Resume Formatting - Showcasing Your Skills

When applying to jobs, it may sometimes feel necessary to adapt your resume for every application, along with your cover letter. As long as you follow certain guidelines, a total revamp of your resume for every job shouldn’t be required beyond tweaking a few keywords.

It’s important to remember that your resume and cover letter are an employer’s first impression of you, and even then, they may just have the time to scan it. Make sure that you have several keywords and phrases about your skills and experiences that match up with desired skills on the job posting. This could be especially useful if an employer puts your resume through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) specifically designed to search for those keywords.

Be sure to elaborate on your skills, especially in your cover letter. You may have “dynamic communication skills”, but unless you give an example of this or tell the employer why it would be useful to them and their company, it might not carry much weight.

Being a strong writer and detail oriented are skills that you can prove right in the formatting of your resume and cover letter. Take extra care to make sure that your font style and sizes are consistent, and that spacing, margins, spelling and other details are completely aligned and correct. Nothing can make an employer move on faster than a spelling or formatting error.