Your Path to Employment Building Your Resume

Your resume is the first impression any prospective employer has of you. Make sure it reflects your best professional self.

The challenge is that the average hiring manager spends 20 seconds or less reviewing a resume. You will need to learn how to catch a hiring manager’s attention immediately by highlighting what hiring managers want to know.

Here are 5 tips to get started, but be sure to login to your NextJob account with your employU access to fully build out your own customized resume.

Write a Powerful Summary

Skip the old “Objective” statement on your resume – if you’re applying, they know you’re objective. Instead, write a brief paragraph that tells the hiring manager why you are a good fit and summarizes your relevant experience, personal attributes, and accomplishments in 3-4 sentences.

Write a Memorable Headline

Boil your resume down even further to give a hiring manager a 3-7 word description of why you are a valuable employee. This should stand out as a memorable tagline, for example: “Proven Leader | Creative Innovator | Dedicated Team Player.”

Add a Testimonial

Take an excerpt from one of your reference letters and use one or two sentences in a quote right in the body of your resume to add instant credibility and interest.

Include Measurable Accomplishments

Get to the bottom line with a list of accomplishments under each of your jobs on your resume. Use action words to describe specific measurable results. For example, use quantities, time frames, percentage of improvement, the benefit gained from your work, etc.

Use Keywords

Keywords will trigger the hiring manager’s interest in you. Keywords also help your resume pop up during online searches and will make it easier for the hiring manager to find your resume when searching their list of applications and resumes.

Customer Portal

Everything you need all on one page! We put together a webpage for our customers to keep handy while they go through the job-seeking process. You find the steps in the process to becoming a customer, video library of content, access link to your NextJob account, and even community resources in your area that could be helpful to you. Be sure to keep it bookmarked for quick access! Visit www.employu.org/customer-portal to check it out.