Introduction

No matter your career path, building a tailored resume is a sure bet for gaining new grounds.

Think about it for a second, what is your short or long term career plan? To become an expert in the marketing industry? To get promoted to a senior role? To earn a lot more than you currently do?

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These are all valid plans. And a great resumè will help you achieve them.

Your resume sets you apart, shows your professional history, experience, skills and past results.

Rather than submitting a generic resumè for every job application you come across, building and updating your resume regularly will save you lots of heartache and place you on an upward trajectory .

Up to 63% of employers favor tailored resumès and that can make a significant difference.

In this article, we’ll be showing you the best ways to sync your resume with your career plans.

Specifically, you’ll see five strategic moves plus examples and the benefits of syncing your resume.

Let’s start right away.

Five strategic moves to sync your resume with your career plans

Here are some distinct but interlinked strategies to tailor your resume to fit your specific career goals:

1.   Build your resume from scratch

Recruiters can smell a copy-and-pasted resume from afar. While this is figurative, it tells you that a shabby resume hardly receives any attention.

The best way to build your resume should be by yourself from the beginning to the end. First, it helps you articulate your words and sentences in a peculiar way and it helps you include the most relevant details of your experience.

This may seem difficult and burdensome but you can cut through the tedious process using an AI resume builder.

These AI builders use pre formed templates to format your details and help you develop the best resume.

The good thing is, you’re able to include important keywords, raw data and write a concise but all-encompassing resumè.

2.   Update your Summary to keep up with trends

Your summary is the first part of your resumè and the best part to summarize your work experience and results in a concise, readable way.

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Your summary is most likely the first thing a recruiter sees after your name. So, you must make it memorable. Include relevant keywords especially for recruiters who use Application Tracking Software(ATS) to review applications

You should keep updating your summary in line with your work. Many times, when people are employed, they make the mistake of living in the now and forget about future opportunities for career growth.

Hence, they don’t go back to refresh their summary. This shouldn’t be you if you’re looking to achieve big career goals.

Remember to include numbers in your summary. This could be years of experience, notable brands worked for as well as specific case study results.

3.   Keep relevant data

No matter how secure your current job is, make sure to document and keep track of relevant data of the results you’ve worked for. This is especially important for analytical roles like management, strategy and search engine optimization(SEO).

For example, if you have to work on a marketing campaign, make sure to keep every valuable data. This includes how many of the key performance indicators you met, the percentages, metrics and even relevant customer data. It will be helpful in the long run especially if you’re laid off and don’t have enough time to get all your data before logging off.

You can retrieve all the data you’ve kept and use them to optimize your resume.

If you increased the number of followers or sales by a certain percentage, make sure to include that in your resume. Apart from how convincing numbers are, there’s also the competence that is seen when you’re able to keep track of data.

4.   Proofread your resume

Many people make the mistake of submitting their resume without going through it to pick out grammatical and spelling errors.

No matter your niche or industry, no one likes a rushed CV. Pay attention to the tenses. When describing job experiences that are in the past, make sure to use the past tense to describe everything you did.

For instance, instead of writing the job description in the present, you write ‘I conducted, trained and onboarded 13 new employees in six months’

That way, it shows that you read through your CV and can pay attention to details.

You can also let a professional editor look through your resume. Another set of eyes could cause a great change. You can see your mistakes and work on perfecting them. You can also get feedback on how convincing your resume looks in general.

5.   Tailor your resume to job descriptions

Employees say that 63% of the time, tailored resumes are favored. Imagine you need someone for a job you want to be done well. Let’s say you need someone to do your laundry. And specifically, you need someone who knows how to wash a peculiar type of fabric.

Rather than choose someone who studied laundromat sciences, you’ll choose someone who says they’ve handled that particular type of fabric and shows proof of their results.

You’ll pick them because you feel they have tailored experience to what you’re looking for. That’s the same way it feels when you tailor your job application to a particular job.

Hence, you have to read the job description thoroughly, find out things like their work culture, benefits and perks, and most importantly their shifts and work schedule. Take a look at some of the 24/7 shift schedule examples you can use to figure out what kind of routine your intended company runs.

When you’re done finding out specifics about the company, look at the required responsibilities and update your resume to show that you’ve done those particular or similar responsibilities in your previous workplace.

Benefits of syncing your resume

Syncing your resume with career plans has many long and short term benefits. From keeping you prepared for random opportunities to helping you get better job search results.

Keep reading to see all the benefits and how your career plan will experience an upward trajectory.

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1.   You’ll not miss out on salient details

Regularly updating your resume summary, results and experiences will help you not to forget details when you’re predisposed to do it.

It makes the work easier as all you have to do is insert a few more keywords and you’re good. That way you don’t miss out on random opportunities.

2.   You get more jobs

It’s a no-brainer that better resumes get better jobs. You have the tendency to get hired for more jobs when your resume shows a high level of experience, professionalism and even soft skills like communication and detail orientation. You’ll also get jobs that are a right fit for you and your career goals rather than just random jobs.

You can even negotiate other things like your perks, salary, PTO and other policies because you’ll be too qualified to be rejected.

3.   You can keep up with trends

The work industry is constantly evolving and the only way to keep up is syncing your resume in view of future change. This involves working on relevant skills, taking courses, attending workshops and  conferences, to be able to fill up the gaps you see on your resume. There’s more drive to be better at what you do and give your current work the best that you can because of your  forward-thinking.

4.   Helps you to be ready with an elevator pitch

Imagine you attended this upper-class party where everyone is sipping good wine and having small conversations. You’re with a group of people laughing and listening and then someone very wealthy, a potential investor or employer works up to you and asks “What do you do?”

Think about what your answer will be for a second. That’s your elevator pitch. You have a few minutes to sell yourself and you have to use the right words, phrases, refer to the best results and win their heart.

That’s what syncing your resume will help you do. It will keep your greatest selling points ready in your mind and help you to articulate a simple summary about who you are, what you offer and what you’ve done in the past. That way, you’ll not miss out on opportunities for work or networking.

Now that you’ve seen all these benefits, it’s time to draw up a plan and start crafting that resume that everyone loves.

Over to you: Start making your resume career-accelerating.

Woohoo!

I’m excited you’ve read up till this point.

There’s nothing as great as knowing the best strategy to land your dream job or achieve your career goals.

That’s why you should get started right away by writing down your goals and making your resume the exact one that can help you achieve those goals.

Remember, your career goals and dreams are valid and you must put in the work to ensure you achieve them. For yourself and for the impact the world is waiting for.

Bio

Martins Favour is a content writer for B2B SaaS brands. She finds a home in weaving worlds out of words. Stories are her life and LinkedIn is her favourite tool

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