The essential elements of a perfect resume

Need to put together your resume? Discover the essential elements you need to include to help you land the job you want.

The pandemic has given us all plenty to think about and plenty of time to do it. If you’ve spent lockdown feeling unsatisfied with your job, whether you’ve been isolated working from home or unhappy having to commute to a role that made you feel unsafe, it’s time to look for a new job. 

Unfortunately there’s plenty of other people in the same boat, so if you want to stand out from the crowd, your resume needs to be one that grabs attention from the start and convinces hiring managers that you’re someone worth talking to. But aren’t resumes basically all the same?

Resume.io has looked into what makes the difference between a killer resume and one that ends up in the bin and they’ve come up with the anatomy of a perfect resume. Unsurprisingly you need to start off well with a summary that leads with your experience and is specifically tailored to the job you’re applying for.

You then need to follow it up with bullet points highlighting your achievements. These need to be concrete examples rather than wishy-washy statements like ‘I have x years of experience’. Tell them exactly what you’ve done and use strong action words like achieved, established and improved to show the impact that you’ve made.

Next up it’s time to list your main skills and again these need to be concrete skills, not soft or vague ones like ‘great communicator’. For this section ensure that you check the job listing, pick out the skills they are telling you that they’re looking for and use their language to show that you have them.

For the rest of your resume it’s your employment and education history, which both need to be in reverse chronological order and only picking out the most crucial information. There’s plenty more tips in this guide for resume writing, so before applying for your next job, make sure you check it out.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema