4 Quick BITS for a Recruiter-focused Résumé

When you think about updating your résumé, you want to focus on four key BITS: Brevity, Impact, Target, and Style

• Brevity

  Ok, here’s the tea with our first tip: Recruiters and hiring managers aren’t giving your written experiences the time you wish they did.

  It's hard to believe, right?! Sadly, they just don’t have the time (who of us does?!) to thoroughly investigate every candidate’s job history. In fact, recruiters usually only have 15-30 seconds (😳) to breeze over your résumé.

  So, when considering our first tip—BREVITY—the goal is to make it easy for readers, whoever they may be, to get a snapshot of your key accomplishments quickly.

  You want to make it skim-ready.

  Swap those long paragraphs full of run-on sentences and fragments for tight bullets. Remove any summaries from roles gone by. Focus on the best of your best highlights and leave the rest to send to your mom. She still cares about the intake you did right after college. (Aren’t moms the best?!)

  Overcommunicating so people put your résumé down and don’t pick it up again is a lose-lose situation.

• Impact

  Outlining your IMPACT is where the rubber meets the road. You’ve got to communicate to a recruiter or hiring manager how you’ve successfully led projects, programs, or teams. “And how do I do that?!” you might ask?

  Include strong action words!

  Make your résumé more compelling by using more descriptive kick-off words than "managed", "assisted", and "collaborated with", being sure to use a new action word at the beginning of each bullet.

  And for the love, let’s all agree to scratch “responsible for” from our résumé vocabulary. I mean, I’m “responsible for” watering my succulents, and I cannot, for the life of me, keep them alive.

  We want to know what you did and its impact on the team, organization, or project. Let the reader sink their teeth into your experience! This helps make your achievements more impactful and significant.

  Try out "implemented", "designed", and "created" to demonstrate your contributions.

• Target

  Now, I cover more about applicant tracking systems and their importance in another post but for our tidBITS purposes, we’ll chat about them briefly here.

  Here’s the deal: You must ensure your résumé is flooded with the appropriate and targeted keywords to get past these gatekeepers and onto a hiring manager’s or recruiter’s desk.

  Now, this doesn’t mean adding words relating to things you’ve never done! Simply put, that’s called keyword stuffing, and you’ll be found out quickly if you haven’t actually done the work or have examples to show for it.

  It does mean strategically rewording your descriptions, where necessary, to, as I like to say, speak the same language as the jobs you’re pursuing.

  For example, you may say you’re great at “customer success,” but a job description says they’re looking for “customer experience.” We know it’s the same skill, but robots are linear, so they want those words and phrases to line up.

  Read through the descriptions of jobs you love and pick out words you think your résumé should include to showcase you as the best fit.

  As I mentioned in the linked post above, don’t be precious about the words and phrases you want to include; speak to the skills the positing is looking for.

• Style

  Oh my goodness I can’t tell you how this one gets me. First off, if I’m printing your résumé, I want it to max out at the front and the back of one single, solitary page. Wasted paper just isn’t my jam. I also get frustrated about unnecessary margins (letting me know you thoughtfully wasted space and, potentially, my time) and large fonts.

  You want to grab attention for the right reasons! And I don’t mean designing your résumé in Photoshop or Illustrator — that may honestly sink any chances of being read by an ATS — but I definitely recommend cleaning up what you’ve got going on now.

  The thing is, everyone loves a good, clean look and feel... it’s honestly refreshing in a sea of really bad documents landing on desks around the globe.

  Also, needless to say, no one should have to work hard to learn more about you! When résumés are messy without correct alignment or direct focus on accomplishments, it makes it really hard to actually download what you’ve done.

  For easier viewing, scrap the images, icons, and sidebars and transition your current document into an executive template. Don’t know what one looks like? Not to worry! I’ve compiled 5 Google templates, from entry-level to executive, for you to get a jump on it.

  Now, go in and streamline your margins, justify your tabs, make your fonts and typeface uniform, and please, please, please align those bullets.

You deserve the best! Now, get that best onto the paper.

🥂 nicole:)