10 Expert Résumé Tips You Need to Land the Interview

Submitting your application and waiting for a response from employers can be an excruciating process. Especially when you’re not hearing back and wondering if something’s amiss with your résumé. These ten expert tips will help you freshen up your résumé so you can land the interview.

1 Modernize Your Résumé

It’s 2017, and we’re in a job seeker’s market. Employers are competing for top candidates. More than 60% of employers are investing in their company career sites and working on improving employer branding to attract you. It’s time to do some in-house improvements and modernize your résumé. Consider creating a visually engaging résumé that incorporates color, graphics, borders, and call-out boxes that really draw the reader’s attention to important metrics and figures. If you need inspiration, check out these visually engaging 2017 résumé samples.

2 Culture Fit Is the New “It” Thing

Having values and goals that mesh with those of the company you’re applying for makes you a cultural fit. Although we hear the term thrown around all the time now, you rarely hear it mentioned when it comes to résumé writing. Yet, 60 percent of recruiters in the 2016 JobVite Recruiter Nation Survey said the job seeker’s résumé was of high importance in their hiring decision. Your résumé is the perfect place to set the stage for showing that you’re a great culture fit for their organization. Values, beliefs, motivation, management style, and communication style are all attributes that employers use to evaluate culture fit, so bring these up in your résumé.

3 Include Your LinkedIn URL

Include your LinkedIn profile URL at the top of the résumé next to your contact information. If you’re using a networking résumé and not applying via an applicant tracking system (ATS), hyperlink the URL so the hiring manager can go right to your profile. If you’re creating an ATS-optimized résumé don’t hyperlink the profile URL because it will cause some systems to toss the résumé out as spam. Some 87 percent of recruiters report using LinkedIn first when it comes to searching for qualified candidates, so this needs to be the first place you direct the employer to so that they can learn more about your accomplishments and evaluate your culture fit for their company.

Here’s a tip: Before you direct hiring managers to your LinkedIn profile, make sure that there are no spelling or grammatical errors in it. According to Jobvite’s survey, 72 percent of employers view typos negatively, and it will affect their decision to interview or hire.

4 Use a Snapshot

Instead of using the top portion of your résumé to provide the employer with a generalized summary of your career history, give them a snapshot of your achievements. Numbers speak volumes. It’s hard to argue with metrics because they show the value you create for the employer. Create a quick snapshot of your key career highlights, biggest successes/results, awards, and top value created. Here’s an example.

5 Remove Filler Words

People love to use filler words when writing résumés, but they don’t really offer any insight into what sets a person apart as a top candidate. Words that would be considered filler include: accomplished, professional, results, or success. What represents success for a financial manager is completely different from what it would be for a project manager. Use job titles instead of the word professional, and explain results, successes, and accomplishments using percentages, dollars, or other metrics.

6 Get Rid of Slow Windups

It’s also a good idea to delete the slow windups that we so often find in résumés. Examples of these include:

• History of implementing …
• Hands-on knowledge and understanding of …
• Master at building, growing, and managing …

Instead say:

• Implemented or Implements …
• Software development: Lean, Agile, scrum, mobile architecture …
• Builds, grows, and manages …

7 Experience Comes First

Applicable experience is still the priority when employers review your résumé. Ensure that your résumé includes your most relevant experience for the position you’re applying to. Here are some pointers to help you:

• Determine which experience is most important to the position. Put this information first in each section of your résumé.
• Put the experience you have that is most related to the position in your career snapshot at the top of your résumé.
• Include related accomplishments and experience as bullets; list them first in your career history.
• Select keywords that connect to the experience the employer is seeking and list them at the top of your résumé.
• Quantify when possible, and share examples using challenge, action, result statements.

8 Consider Using Two Different Résumés

I always advise my clients to diversify their job search and not invest all their job search time on job boards. However, if the bulk of your job search is consisting of applying online, I recommend having a modern, visually engaging résumé that is ATS-optimized. You can use one version to get through the applicant tracking system and the other when networking, sending your résumé to someone via email, or tapping into the hidden job market. This way, you can cover both bases—getting past ATS and also catching the eye of the recruiter.

9 Follow Up

In the 2016 Recruiter Nation Survey, 59 percent of recruiters reported that they keep in touch with candidates after they apply. Recruiters want to build their talent pools so that they’ll have great candidates they can reach out to as new opportunities land on their desk. The majority of candidates will never follow up with a recruiter, so it’s to your advantage to do so.

10 Include the Right Soft Skills

Soft skills are personality descriptors that come from your character, values, attitude, and communication skills. LinkedIn’s recent 2017 Global Trends Survey revealed that 35 percent of recruiters stated soft skills assessment will be a leading factor affecting future recruiting trends. Employers are searching for ways to assess soft skills, so it’s important to talk about them on your résumé. I’m not talking about the overused phrases such as “excellent communication” or “team player” either. I recommend you incorporate the related keyword within the context of an accomplishment that demonstrates that soft skill. Here’s an example:

Recovered $2,000,000 missing revenue through attention to detail and meticulous review of 350 customer accounts.

“Attention to detail” and “meticulous” are soft skills, but possessing them enabled this candidate to locate a critical error and recover $2 million in missing revenue. Without her attention to detail, she would have overlooked the hidden error. You can do the same with any soft skill that you possess—simply insert the soft skill within the context of the accomplishment. As you sit down to freshen up your résumé and embark on your job search, consider the tips above to ensure your résumé receives a great response.

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About the Author: Jessica Holbrook Hernandez is President and CEO of Great Resumes Fast, a Certified Social Branding Analyst, and 10-time award-winning executive resume writer. She was named 2017’s Best Resume Writer. You can find her at greatresumesfast.com.

Make Your Writing Clearer: 6 Tips for Rewording Sentences

The author James Michener said, “I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” If you’re an aspiring author or someone striving for clarity in your professional or academic writing, you appreciate the methodical march of the rewriting process. Each word in a sentence has a job; cut those that do nothing. These six tips will help you achieve clear and concise writing.

Avoid the Passive Voice

The passive voice is flaccid. The subject becomes a helpless thing, acted on by outside forces. In a well-written sentence, the verb is powerful and precise, an active tool at the subject’s command. For example:

• Passive: It is believed by the boxer that the power is there to cause his opponent to fall down.
• Active: The boxer thinks he has a knock-out punch.

Trim the Fat from Flabby Phrases

Some writers use wordy phrases when a single word will do.

Use because instead of:

• Due to the fact that
• In light of the fact that
• Owing to the fact that

Use about instead of:

• Concerning the matter of
• In reference to
• With regard to

Use can instead of:

• Is able to
• Is in a position to
• Has the capacity to

Limit Prepositional Phrases

Use an apostrophe, not a prepositional phrase, to show possession.

• Bad: It was the opinion of the teacher that Susan was ready for third grade.
• Better: In the teacher’s opinion, Susan was ready for third grade.

Don’t use too many prepositional phrases in a sentence.

• Bad: The ultimate point of the discussion with all of the people was to reach a consensus of the group about what to do with the leftover funds from the fundraiser.
• Better: The group discussed options for the leftover fundraiser money and ultimately reached a decision.

Watch for Wordiness

Wordiness is a problem for many writers, whether it’s redundancy, stating the obvious, or packing a sentence with excess detail and unnecessary modifiers.

• Wordy: Imagine in your mind what a caveman from an earlier prehistoric time must have thought about when he originally saw fire for the first time.
• Better: Imagine what prehistoric man thought when he saw fire for the first time.

For precision and clarity, excise these words from your writing:

• kind of
• sort of
• really
• basically
• actually
• generally
• typically
• for all intents and purposes

Edit your writing for redundant pairs such as:

• true facts
• past history
• free gift
• unexpected surprise
• each individual

Combine Sentences

In many cases, you can combine information from two short sentences into one complex sentence without sacrificing clarity. Sentence variety also improves readability.

• Wordy: The house next door is occupied by three widowed sisters. They moved here in 1985 with their three dogs and haven’t left since.
• Better: Three widows and their dogs live next door, their home since 1985.

Avoid Vague Nouns and Noun Strings

All-purpose nouns, such as factor, situation, and area, lead to obscure writing.

• Vague: A college education is an important factor in finding a job in the area of accounting.
• Better: For accounting jobs, a college degree is important.

Writers in a specialty niche such as healthcare or technology often slip into jargon, resulting in noun strings that obscure meaning.

• Vague: The mammography team is working on the radiology technologist radiation protection quality improvement program.
• Better: The mammography team will complete a quality improvement program for protecting radiology technicians from excess radiation.

Writing for clarity requires a ruthless eye for editing your work; it’s helpful to walk away from your composition for a few hours and approach it with new eyes. Then cut the unnecessary, rewrite the unwieldy, and, in the words of Elmore Leonard, “Try to leave out the parts that people skip.”

Do you have any favorite techniques for clearing up your writing?

7 Reasons to Love the English Language

Isn’t English grand?

Even if English has been called “a bastard tongue” by many, I still love it. Complex, creole, and occasionally confusing, English is a language that has borrowed and stolen some of the best elements of other languages to make something all its own. Who couldn’t love the language that gave us hilarious-sounding words like “wabbit” and “nagware”?

And with 1.5 billion active speakers, it’s also one of the most widely adopted languages in history. Because of this, I want to take a moment to honor all of the quirks that make English the cutie nerd of every English-speaking logophile’s dreams. Here are some fun facts I’ve cultivated over a twenty-six-year love affair with everything English.

1 The English language is always growing.

Yes, it’s true. The English language continues to grow at a breakneck pace. Don’t believe me? Check out the OED’s Twitter account to see how many words are added to the dictionary each year.

2 Shakespeare had a hand in its development.

April 23 is Shakespeare’s birthday, as well as the UN’s English Language Day. What a coincidence! It’s almost like Shakespeare is the father of the English language.

3 English spelling is a glorious mystery, even to its native speakers.

Irregular, inconsistent spelling is one of the things that separates English from many other languages. Languages like French and German, which are closely related to English, generally follow a set of rules when forming different verb tenses, for example. English has so many irregular verb forms that they are almost a rule all on their own.

4 English has some pretty long words . . .

via GIPHY

Generally speaking, English is a very efficient language that takes fewer characters than many other Roman-alphabet languages. However, that doesn’t mean English is devoid of lengthy words! Some of the longest words in English might surprise you. For instance, did you know “strengths” is one of the longest monosyllabic (one-syllable) words in English?

5 . . . and some short ones, too.

via GIPHY

On the flipside, English has many one- and two-letter words. Often, these “little words” are articles or conjunctions, but once again, there are a few suprises!

6 There are multiple dialects.

Another spelling conundrum English presents is its obsession with creating different spelling rules for different dialects. Just ask any British, Canadian, American, Australian, Indian, or Nigerian English speaker how to spell “city center.” You’ll get at least two different answers (due to different allegiances to British and American spellings), or possibly three!

7 English is old. Ancient, in fact.

Although Shakespeare is credited with coining a large number of words we now use in English, the language predates him by hundreds of years. In fact, researchers have found that some words in English have remained completely unchanged for thousands of years! Even though it has kept some of these very old words, English has also added new ways to express emotion, meaning, and scientific facts. Clearly, the English language is like a fine wine—it gets better with age.

Did I miss one of your favorite anglophone facts? Let me know below!

7 Books That Will Help You Land Your First Job

Graduation. Ten letters that spell either “opportunity,” or “pure, unadulterated terror,” depending on your plans for after you walk across the stage and officially become a college grad. If you have your post-grad life figured out, congratulations! You’re ahead of the game. Kick back, read a book, and wait for real life to hit you.

But if you have no idea what you’re going to do, or are hustling to land that first gig, don’t worry. We’ve all been there. While career planning can be maddening, you will get through this intermediary period and arise from the ashes of your college career like a glorious, mature phoenix.

You’ve got this.

Since books can often help you get through the slog of job hunting and career planning, we partnered with Textbooks.com to create a reading list for college grads. Here are a few books that will help you land that gig as a designer, engineer, teacher, fortune cookie writer, or whatever it is you’ve decided to be.

1 What Color Is Your Parachute? 2017

Often considered one of the classic job search books, What Color Is Your Parachute? is updated annually to provide the most up-to-date information to job seekers. This book’s combination of current tactics and age-old advice makes this a must-read for anyone engaged in a long or difficult job search.

2 The 2-Hour Job Search

Although Parachute is a classic, it has been criticized for its more traditional approach to job hunting. The 2-Hour Job Search is the exact opposite. This manual for the Internet age of job hunting will help you navigate the online jobscape in a manageable way. Although you may take more than two hours to land an interview, the tips in this book are solid.

3 Welcome to the Real World

Lauren Berger has gained widespread fame as The Intern Queen, and her first work of nonfiction is just as practical and down-to-earth as the section of her blog by the same name. This sizeable tome covers everything from time management to angling for a promotion and will prove invaluable once you land your first gig.

4 Congratulations, by the Way

When you reach the point in your job search where you’ve sent in one too many cover letters, updated your resume for the millionth time, and just need a break, take heart—we’ve all been there. George Saunders’ advice to the class of 2013 can help you push through. His short but powerful speech on kindness can put even the most stressful of life’s transitions in context. Here’s a taste of his refreshing prose:

There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

5 Now What?

Not sure what career path you want to take? Check out this manual for finding your passion and pursuing it. Now What? presents a no-nonsense approach to finding your (employable) passion, which can be helpful for recent grads awash in feel-good career advice.

6 The Complete Q&A Job Interview Book

If you need more practical interview tips, this compendium of questions and answers can be your guide. Come for the example questions and answers, stay for the truth bombs about proper interview etiquette.

Here’s a tip: Need help writing emails before and after your interview? We have a guide for that.

7 The Elements of Resume Style

Your campus career services can only take your resume so far. If you need detailed information on resume formats for your field, this Strunk and White–esque guide is where it’s at. Need something a little shorter? We also have a few blogs you can use to get your resume in fighting shape.

Have you read a book that changed your perspective on your career after graduation? Share it in the comments below!

NBA Grammar Power Rankings

Since we launched our NFL Grammar Power Rankings (followed by MLB and college football), sports fans and journalists alike have urged us: “Do basketball next!” Basketball season has finally arrived, so we put NBA fans to the grammar test.

Who’s shooting bricks and who’s getting nothin’ but net when it comes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation? We began by collecting the first five comments posted under articles on each official SB Nation NBA team blog until we’d gathered a total of 100 comments (of 50 words or more) for each team. Using Grammarly’s algorithms, we identified the errors, and then a team of live proofreaders verified and tallied them. We counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement.

To avoid skewing the rankings, we didn’t penalize catchphrases like “da Bulls,” Internet lingo, common slang, team nicknames, or stylistic variations like serial comma usage. Finally, we calculated the average number of mistakes per one hundred words by dividing the total word count of the comments by the total number of mistakes for each team.

The Upper Midwest scored a win, with the Minnesota Timberwolves coming in on top and Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Bucks landing at third. The Denver Nuggets pulled in just behind the Wolves at second. The Atlanta Hawks, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Utah Jazz didn’t fare as well, landing in the bottom three.

Despite coming in twelfth overall, Knicks fans had the most diverse vocabularies, using twenty-five unique words per one hundred words. Check out our infographic to find out where your team’s fan base ranked and even learn a few of their favorite words.

To share this infographic with your blog readers, embed this in your blog post by pasting the following HTML snippet into your web editor:

Please attribute this infographic to https://www.grammarly.com/grammar-check

Avoid the 7 Blogging Mistakes That Reduce Your Traffic

When you start blogging, you can almost smell success in terms of your marketing strategies. Blogging can be a powerful way to expand your audience, but if you do it wrong it can work the other way. Below are seven blogging mistakes you may not be aware you are committing.

Instability in blog posting

Be direct and make sure your message is clear.

People are intelligent and capable of determining what they believe and what they do not. Little mistakes, slight inaccuracies, and misunderstandings can easily break their trust. Additionally, blogs that come across as vague make it difficult for readers to understand exactly what your message is.

Wasting too much time writing

How can people read your blog if they never discover it?

Spending all your time writing blog posts may distract you from other important matters, like marketing. Yes, writing blogs—especially if you want to create valuable ones—can become time-consuming, but if you spend too much time writing, it may defeat the purpose of the blog you spent all your time on. Leave time to work on marketing your blog and finding effective distribution channels for your articles.

Keyword stuffing

Too many keywords in a post can signal to Google that your content is spam. Focus on naturally incorporating long-tail keywords.

Keyword stuffing for new bloggers may not come easy, but it’s not a habit worth cultivating. Stuffing your articles with keywords may lead Google to tag your blog as spam. Rather than overloading your post with keywords, improve your search ranking by using long-tail keywords (specific phrases directly related to your content) together with LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing keywords—peripheral keywords that are related to your long-tail keywords).

Multiple topic blogs

Too many topics in one blog can cause information overload.

Some bloggers think that the more information they write or the more perspectives they share, the more it will help them attract an audience. Here’s the thing: jumping all over the place will not attract a wide audience—it will cause them to lose interest. Make up your mind, focus on a single topic, and progress from there. Do not give your readers a headache trying to figure out the message you want to get across.

No categories or too many categories

A blog that has no heading organization or too many scattered categories is a pain.

Yes, you need to make use of categories or sub headers on your blog. Not having them at all (or having too many categories or sub headers) makes your blog content difficult to navigate and digest. In writing blogs, what you want is to give readers just enough of the information they need.

Disregard visitors

Check blog comments and respond promptly.

You are writing blogs to invite visitors. But failing to give them attention may discourage readers from returning. Attending to their comments or inquiries as soon as possible is a must. A visitor who is left hanging will feel unimportant and less likely to come back. They may even tell their friends about the bad experience they had with you.

Miscalculating SEO

Read a bit about SEO and make sure you’re tracking your efforts correctly.

There are many ways to make your blog rank, but if you are benchmarking your SEO poorly then you might as well say goodbye to traffic. If word density, blog structure, categories, and subcategories are not properly tracked and benchmarked, your SEO will suffer.

What are some mistakes you have made on your blog? What other tips would you give to bloggers to improve their traffic?

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Vincent Hill writes on different categories like starting a blog, content writing, blog design, and much more. His writing is not only descriptive but also meaningful. He loves to share his ideas on different categories.

Capitalization After Colons

Capitalization: First Word After a Colon

In British English, the first letter after a colon is capitalized only if it’s a proper noun or an acronym; in American English, the first word after a colon is sometimes capitalized if it begins a complete sentence.

Here are some quick tips for using colons properly:

• When a colon introduces a list of of things, do not capitalize the first word after the colon unless it is a proper noun.
• When a colon introduces a phrase or an incomplete sentence that is meant to add information to the sentence before it, do not capitalize the first word after the colon unless it is a proper noun.
• When a colon introduces a complete sentence, you may capitalize the first word after the colon according to some style guides. Read on for details.

When’s the last time you used a colon in your writing? Many writers avoid this punctuation mark because they’re unsure how to use it properly. Colons can be quite useful, though. Not only do they introduce lists, but they also alert the reader to an explanation of the previous sentence. Colons provide a way of expounding upon information in such a way that connects the ideas in two or more sentences.

Capitalize After Colon? (APA Style)

One of the tricky issues many writers deal with when it comes to colons is whether or not to capitalize the word following the colon. As with so many things in the English language, capitalization with colons can be complex, and many times, it’s more of a style issue than one of correctness. According to APA Style, the first word after the colon is capitalized only if it begins a complete sentence. Consider the examples below:

It’s been snowing for three days straight: the roads around here aren’t very safe for driving.

It’s been snowing for three days straight: The roads around here aren’t very safe for driving.

Capitalize After Colon? (The Chicago Manual of Style)

The Chicago Manual of Style has a slightly different perspective on whether to capitalize after colons. In their view, the word following a colon should be capitalized only if there are two explanatory sentences following the colon. Look at the examples below:

Maggie wears a brimmed cap at all times: Strong light often gives her a headache.

Maggie wears a brimmed cap at all times: strong light often gives her a headache.

Maggie wears a brimmed cap at all times: Strong light often gives her a headache. She also likes the way it looks.

Never Capitalize After Colon When Introducing a List

Both style manuals agree on one thing, though. It is never ok to capitalize the word after a colon when the word introduces a list. The following sentences illustrate this hard-and-fast rule:

Jan needed a few more items to complete her job application: A resume, cover letter, and references.

Jan needed a few more items to complete her job application: a resume, cover letter, and references.