Guest post by Dennis Lodge
If you have chosen to read this article, you probably already experienced the fact that London job hunting is a competitive endeavour. To live up to this competition, you should shake off the dust from your resume. Continue reading and you will know the best resume writing tips for landing a job in the UK.
Choose your format
There are three most common formats of a resume:
- Functional — this type lists your skills and qualifications rather than specific work experience. Use this format in case your career history is too distorted, unrelated to the job you apply to, or has significant gaps. The advantage of the functional resume is that it puts the attention of the recruiter on your abilities, and is not cluttered with unnecessary information. Functional resumes work best for a significant change of career.
- Chronological — this type is the most popular. It has a brief of your job history listed in reverse chronological order. You should use it if your prospect work is similar to your previous job experience. It should be noted that recruiters often prefer chronological resumes over functional, and some software even excludes the latter from the recruiter’s list.
- Combined — this resume is a compromise of the two approaches. If you have to list your employment history but still want to emphasise your skills, use a combination resume. The history part goes at the bottom of the document, and you can explain all questionable points in it in the first part of your resume. Together with your soft and hard skills and your achievements.
Write with a specific goal
When you picked the best format for your resume, fill it with relevant information. That means that you should strive to fit the expectations of a certain workplace, rather than talk about your work experiences in general. Every recruiter has an idea of whom they are looking for. Find out what that is and fill your resume with the items they seek.
Additionally, you should represent your career achievements in numbers. If you have a successfully completed project, note the time period in which you have completed it. And put exact numbers of things you achieved by this project in your previous workplace.
Reflect on the No’s
Every job search has to deal with rejection, and, obviously, you will hear negative replies more often than acceptance. But use it to your advantage. Let every event of a failed interview become a step forward for you. Because you will get valuable feedback on what is wrong with your professional image.
Consider asking your next recruiter about the specifics of why they deemed you unfitting. They would not usually deny you this information because everyone would want to mitigate the effects of a failed interview. Take advantage of it and make improvements to your resume with every bit of feedback you will receive.
Photo by Van Tay Media on Unsplash
List your hard skills
This point often gets forgotten while being very important. Hard skills include your proficiencies with various software and technology, bookkeeping, your knowledge of foreign languages, and other things that are hard to learn. Companies look for these specific skills because they do not want to spend additional time and resources on training their new employees.
Almost any job teaches you some hard skills, so you need to mention them for your benefit. And if you have additional language proficiencies, do not omit them too. Companies value candidates who can offer them new diplomatic opportunities.
Pay attention to smaller details
Your grammar, spacing, and even the font of your resume’s text play a considerable role. Make sure your document does not have any mistakes. You can use grammar-checking programs to automatically highlight most of them. But do not rely on the program completely and proofread the text with your own eyes as well. Pay attention to commonly misspelled words to make your resume clear of rookie mistakes.
The best fonts for official documents are Times New Roman, Verdana, and Arial. Resumes in Comic Sans get discarded without reading.
Do not neglect your non-job experiences
Yes, you are allowed to put activities in your resume that are not considered a job. That includes volunteering, school activities, professional hobbies, and other similar experiences that taught you valuable skills. Especially, hard skills. Obviously, if you had a coding practice as a side project, do not omit it from your resume while seeking an IT position. And if you have a personal blog, you might want to mention it when looking for any job that has to do with writing, PR, or advertising.
Use keywords
An Applicant Tracking System is software used to filter resumes during recruiting campaigns. The employers feed it with words relevant to their job. The more such keywords appear in your resume, the better. And when there are not enough of them, it gets rejected without looking. That is why you need to research the keywords that are important for the position you are applying to.
Another reason is that they simply look appealing to the reader. When recruiters see the right words in your resume, they know that you are the right person for them.
Research your prospect company
When looking for a job in the UK, you can go the extra mile and be ahead of your competitors by researching the details about your future employment. When you will know the context of their work, their problems, and their needs, you will know the exact things you have to write in your resume. If the recruiter sees that you are on topic with the workflow of their company, they will have more reasons to lend you a job.
Final words
Looking for a job, be it in London or anywhere else, can be stressful enough. But there is one thing in this hectic activity that you can control – your resume. Every person has talents, and every adult person has experience. The question is, how to put these efficiently into your resume. By following these pieces of advice you can make it shiny and appealing.
Author
Dennis Lodge is a freelance journalist, blogger, and copywriter at UK.CareersBooster.com who writes unique and research-based content on business, careers, education, and job search strategies.
