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Resumes have a way of quickly getting outdated. Today’s hot keywords and phrases become tomorrow’s industry clichés. New achievements can pile up without getting documented. Career objectives may change. It’s important to regularly address these developments and make sure your resume stays fine-tuned to catch the eye of a hiring manager.

Take a look at the resume maintenance steps below and consider applying them to your resume today.

Laser-focus your career goal

Many job seekers’ biggest issue is not knowing what they want to accomplish next, an especially big problem for those changing careers. When a job seeker is uncertain, mission creep begins to set in and extra information gets included to appeal to a broad range of companies or industries.

Whether you’ve settled on writing a formal objective section or you just want to keep it in the back of your head, the biggest step toward decluttering a resume is concentrating on one specific kind of job. If you are going for multiple kinds of jobs, you need multiple versions of your resume. Using this approach makes it simpler to focus on relevant content.

Write a tight summary

Everyone likes to talk (or write) about themselves, and giving into this tendency can result in a summary section that reads like an autobiography. Instead, your summary should be a brief listing of your qualifications and experience. It should be concise, but descriptive and definitely not boring.

Avoid getting overly ‘salesy’ and philosophical. Hiring managers typically have to sift through a lot of resumes and once they start reading self-indulgent patter, they will start to lose interest in you as a person and as a candidate.

You want to grab your readers attention and keep them reading.

Stick to essential work experience

Your resume’s work history section ought to be a breakdown of your career chronology and a handful of major achievements at your most recent jobs. For professionals with a long employment history, outlining early experience more than 10 to 15 years old can help emphasize more recent, and hopefully more impressive, accomplishments.

Some hiring managers prefer to see summaries of earlier jobs as opposed to long, comprehensive explanations. You may want to write short, one-line descriptions of earlier jobs and don’t list every job that you’ve had since college.

Often, resumes have too much detail on job duties and not enough on the achievements. Although it is useful for applicants to offer a brief breakdown of the range of their obligations, this information can be summed up in just a handful of sentences.

When describing achievements on your resume, use numbers. If you can’t use a dollar amount, ratio, percentage or other number in some other way, don’t include the accomplishment. Quantified achievements have more value to a company than general statements that say what was done at each job.

At Action Group Staffing, we help job seekers with everything from resume writing to interview prep. If you are currently looking to take the next step on your career path, please contact us today.


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