Employability Series: Crafting an Effective Resume

Tailoring your resume to fit the description of the job that you’re applying for is often equally important as the strength of your resume itself. Applying for jobs online can often be a challenge.

With so many positions with various descriptions for similar job duties can make using a singular resume for all applications and easy alternative to consistently modifying your resume to each job you’re applying to. There are a number of different steps that a resume takes once you’ve applied for a job online and getting through many of those steps relies on utilizing the proper wording in your resume.

“Your resume and your cover letter will never get you a job but that isn’t their purpose,” said Bryant & Stratton Career Services Representative, Michael Lester. “[You] need to put something compelling enough together to make a company want to talk to you. A company writes a job description because that’s what they want in an employee, and your resume needs to reflect that.”

A new video resource available in the Career Services section of the Bryant & Stratton website not only details the journey a resume takes once it’s been submitted, but also the keys to properly tailoring your resume to each job description Some of these keys include using keywords from the job description in your resume so that electronic scanners, recruiters and human resources representatives pass your information along to the next stage of the hiring process. Crafting an effective resume and cover letter is one vitally important tool for any college graduate and it’s one of the many points of emphasis our Career Services team focuses on when providing career advisement to our graduates.

“People that are most effective at selling themselves will get a job and it starts with your resume,” said Lester. “If we don’t include key words you won’t make it through the Applicant Tracking Software and no one will ever see your resume.”

Contact our Career Services staff today to learn more about crafting a resume that takes advantage of specific keywords and gives you the best opportunity to get an interview for the jobs you’re applying to. You can also view our new resume video by following this link.