Is your First Job Helping or Hurting your Applications?

When it comes to listing your past work experiences, there are a variety of questions you should ask yourself to ensure you compose a resume that gets the right attention from employers and gets you invited for interviews.

As you move through your career, you may want to consider whether it’s time to start dropping some of your earlier positions from your list of experiences. Here are a few points to consider when doing so:

• Does the past job relate to or support your current career goal? Considering this question is important depending on the overall length of your resume, as you may not have enough content to justify 2 pages, and you don’t want to spill over a second page and create too much content for employers to read.

• Keep it relevant. Compare the experience and skills requested in 3-5 different positions you’re applying for to your job experience on your resume. Do your past positions include the right keywords to pass Applicant Tracking System (ATS) scanning software? If not, it may be time to let some of them go.

• Were you studying and attending training at this same time? If you’re a recent graduate, it may be good to keep these things on your resume to prove your enhanced skills in multi-tasking while balancing two or more commitments simultaneously.

• Are you repeating the same skills and experience? As you go back in your resume, it’s beneficial to remove any unnecessary duplication to ensure that there is space for employers to focus on your unique and valuable content.

• Can someone guess how old you are? Are the skills no longer relevant? When looking back at your experiences, if you haven’t used it in the last 7-10 years it’s important to think about whether you can still claim to be proficient in doing that skill, or if anything has changed in that industry so you’d be starting from scratch again to require retraining.
  

If you’re looking for a critique of your resume, or if you’ve been sending out your resume with minimal responses, reach out to Lutherwood Employment Services for support. We have free services to support individuals in their job search efforts. We can also link you to online learning centres for more tips on resumes, cover letters, and interviews.