Career expert shares tips for crafting effective resumes
ALBERTA, CANADA — Career expert Sheila Musgrove shared her proven processes for crafting resumes that get job seekers noticed and hired.
“Most job seekers make a big mistake using a very outdated, old school resume format that’s filled with one to three pages of bullets that describe your functional job,” Musgrove, founder of TAG Recruitment and an author, told in an interview on Global News Morning Calgary.
She advocates using a “game-changing” two-step resume formula:
- Briefly state your role – what level you reported to, your job title, scope, and how many others did the same job
- Highlight key successes or achievements with hard numbers, percentages, or rankings.
Musgrove stated, “You [hiring managers] do want to look at those bullets and say ‘What can we measure?’”
She also cautions against long summaries, which often go unread.
“That type of resume doesn’t tell your hiring manager how well you performed in the past… Don’t go back further than 10 years because you can’t probably remember all of the key results… You’ll remember more accurately in the last two to five years.”
Once the resume is crafted tightly, her advice is to “rehearse it out loud, walk into that interview confidently, and you will own that interview.”
Regarding the “tough” salary question, Musgrove suggests applicants to think about where they are currently from a compensation standpoint and where they want to be in their next position.
Experts previously warned that traditional resumes would be replaced by skills-based hiring, but a study from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School reveals that this has not significantly diversified hiring.
