A resume is the summation of your work experience, skills, abilities, qualifications, and accomplishments. It’s a tool that helps you sell yourself to potential recruiters.
Resumes provide you with the opportunity to show that you qualify for a job. Once you land an interview, it’s your responsibility to convince the interviewer that you’re the right fit.
From an organization’s perspective, interviews require a lot of time and effort. Companies use resumes to identify potential fits quickly and improve hiring efficiency.
In this article, we’ll go over the purpose of a resume for both the candidate and organizations, and provide tips on improving your resume.
Let’s dive right in.
An excessive simplification of the purpose of a resume is that it gets you an interview. For a more in-depth look, a resume helps you:
On top of that, building your resume can help you discover hidden skills and abilities.
Your resume allows you to tell your narrative according to your perspective, allowing you to choose what the recruiter sees.
Since you can tell your story according to your preference, you can mention specific experiences, achievements, and more.
Choose what parts of your career and work you want to highlight. This gives recruiters a sense of who you are and the work you’ve done over time.
For example, if you’ve worked on a major project, you can focus your resume around that. Explain what the project was, your contribution to it, what you achieved, and the outcome of the project due to your efforts.
Alternatively, you can provide a list of small wins and achievements over time to show your progression.
Your resume provides a summary of all your skills relevant to the job you’re applying to.
You’ve likely developed a wide and diverse skill set throughout your career. For example, if you’re a content marketer, you might have picked up design skills along the way.
Most job descriptions list several required skills, and you might not have all of them. However, you can mention the skills you do have, along with additional skills that may be relevant to the job but aren’t mentioned.
Even if you have all the required skills, it’s still best to add additional skills to your resume that may come in handy. This can give you an advantage over similarly qualified applicants.
It’s best to alter your resume for each job to mention relevant skills. Or, at the very least, change the order of the list.
Your resume will provide an outlook of who you are – providing hints of your personality and how you work.
Since your resume is the first point of contact with a recruiter, it represents you and your potential. You won’t have a chance to converse with the recruiter until you pass the screening process, especially if you’re applying for a remote job.
That’s why you have to tailor your resume to show that. If you’re a naturally creative person, sending a templated resume will not reflect that.
However, if you send a custom-designed and personalized resume, that would allow the recruiter to perceive you as a creative and initiative-oriented professional.
A resume helps you collect all relevant information in a single place, creating a reference point.
Having all your career information well-organized in one place gives you quick access to any details you may need. This is helpful with standardized applications where you may not be asked to add a resume. You can simply look at your resume and add all the necessary information.
Your resume will act as a guide wherever you need to add such information. Similar to the resume, you can also draft a general cover letter and tailor it according to different companies and requirements.
For businesses, resumes help make the hiring process more efficient. They help companies:
They also help companies keep a list of potential candidates.
Organizations can receive hundreds of applications, and resumes allow them to distinguish the leading candidates quickly.
Most jobs receive an overwhelming number of applications and a lot of them are not relevant for the job. Resumes allow recruiters to quickly check whether a candidate’s career and experience are relevant.
That’s why it’s a good practice to keep your resume on a single page and put your title at the top.
After that, pinpointing certain aspects like bolding your job titles in the work experience section further help the recruiter.
Doing so will not only help the recruiter but also give a positive impression of you. Not only will they be able to find the important information easily, but also they’ll notice that you took the time to make it easy for them.
It will also allow them to quickly find out whether you’re a fit or not.
Resumes give recruiters a quick introduction, providing an idea of what you can bring to the organization.
Since the recruiter has to go through tons of applications, even after the screening process, they can’t deeply research each candidate.
Even if a recruiter asks for your LinkedIn profile, personal website, and other details, they won’t check all of that until they have a good feeling about you.
That’s why you should think of your resume as an introduction where you display your value and potential. And show the recruiter what contributions and additions you can make to the company.
If you impress the recruiter, they’re likely to check out your social media handles and website.
Resumes provide a quick but necessary overview that helps recruiters in the interview stage.
Recruiters use resumes to determine your overall career progression. Furthermore, they take a look at your online presence and personal brand.
This helps them develop personalized questions for the interview stage.
An overview like this is important when there are multiple rounds of interviews. In those cases, recruiters can make quick notes of what to ask a candidate based on their resume.
For the candidate, this is an opportunity to tailor your resume so you can expect certain questions you can answer well.
Organizations can use your resume to find a role for you that may fit better, depending on your skills and experience.
Most recruiters tend to set aside resumes if they don’t quite fit the job opening but may be a good fit for another available role. After discussing with the relevant stakeholders, they might contact a candidate about applying for another role that’s likely to be better for them.
Organizations also keep promising resumes to look back on when a new role opens up. If they have a good resume on file, they may forward opportunities to those candidates before calling for general applications.
This is why it’s advisable to add additional skills and experiences to your resume. A good record of your extracurricular experiences, skills, and talents can help the recruiter easily match you with another job role.
If you see several open roles at a company and you’re applying for one of them, add any skills and experiences relevant to one of the other jobs as well.
That said, many companies also have an open or general application where you can attach your resume and information. Recruiters use that to automatically match you with relevant jobs whenever they pop up.
Getting your resume to be more purposeful is a matter of ticking some boxes.
You should ditch the templated black-and-white resume and opt for a better-looking and fresh resume.
Keep in mind that it is absolutely crucial that you don’t make any grammar, spelling, or formatting mistakes in your resume. Double-check your resume when you’re making it and before sending it.
Other than that, you should also make an effort to do the following:
Make sure you manage to answer the basic questions a recruiter would ask. For the most part, there are four main questions you should aim to answer.
The first question doesn’t end at your name, contact details, and title. You can further provide an outlook of who you are by providing more information on your education, the languages you speak, and your extracurricular experience, among other things.
For example, adding volunteer experience is a great way to add substance.
As for the second question, you don’t need to answer why you applied for the job directly. You can succinctly answer this question by showing a natural progression in your career.
For example, if you’re applying for a Senior Product Manager job, ideally your last work experience would be a Product Manager job. However, this is only one way to do this, and if you’re making a lateral move, it will automatically answer the question.
Answering the question about your experience is straightforward – it includes all relevant experience to the job you’re applying to. However, you shouldn’t resort only to adding direct job experiences.
Make an effort to add side projects, freelance work, contractual work, and any pro bono work you’ve done over the years.
Answering how you plan to make an impact can be tricky, but you can do so by adjusting some other entries in the resume.
For example, you can highlight the achievements and changes you brought to a previous company to display the impact you can make. If you helped improve the efficiency of the workflow at a company, mention that along with the impact it made.
You can set yourself apart from the rest of the candidates by making your resume unique.
If you manage to generate interest through your resume, you can easily pass the screening process. However, generating that interest requires additional effort and unique changes to your resume.
Developing creative resumes works best in certain industries, like the graphic design and marketing industries. However, you can always add a unique touch to your resume, regardless of what industry you’re in (unless there’s a rule against it).
You can also add something to your single-page resume, such as an additional section if you have the space.
For example, if you’re a great troubleshooter, list a number of things you could fix so the company wouldn’t need outside help (like resetting the Wi-Fi router).
It’s always best to customize your resume for every job, based on the job description.
Every time you apply for a job, you should make an effort to customize your resume according to the job description.
For example, you can move to the top your achievements and work experience that best reflect the position you’re applying to. You can add specific skills that are likely to help in that job.
This would also help you pass automated applicant tracking systems.
If a company asks for communication skills as a top skill, add it to the top of your skills list. If a company doesn’t focus on educational qualifications, keep them at a minimum and expand your work experience section.
Other than that, you can also make company-specific changes. For example, if your resume follows a color theme, you can change the color theme to match the organization’s colors.
Let’s say you’re applying to Facebook (Meta), you can change your color theme to black, white, and blue to reflect the company’s colors.
These small things may seem trivial, but collectively they can make a huge impact on your application and get you to the interview stage.
The purpose of a resume extends far beyond a simple summary of your qualifications. It’s a tool for you to make an impact without ever talking to a recruiter.
Furthermore, it helps to see the purpose of a resume from both the candidate’s and the recruiter’s perspective. This allows you to understand what you should add to show them you’re the right candidate, and what you can do to make the recruiter’s job easy.
Always think of your resume as an introduction to who you are and what you bring to the table. Be concise, direct, and clear.
Try our free Personal Brand Assessment to find out.
