How to Build a Custom Resume for a Dream Job

You’ve found it: the perfect job posting. Your skills and experience match every single line under “Essential Duties.” The job title is exactly what you’ve been looking for. Best of all, it’s a posting from none other than your dream employer.

Now that you’ve found the perfect job posting, how do you produce a resume that is equally perfect – leaving the hiring manager no choice but to pick up the phone for an interview? Here’s how:

Sound like yourself.

Yes, a resume should be written in a professional tone. But it should be your professional tone, not the one you think a hiring manager wants to hear.

Erase canned phrases like “results-oriented professional” from your resume. In their place, use specific keywords from the job posting itself. If you found the posting on your recruiter’s website, talk to your recruiter about which keywords to highlight most. Your recruiter knows the employer well and will know what their hiring staff are looking for.

Open with a custom-crafted summary.

Skip the “objective” portion of the traditional resume. Instead, include a “summary” that describes what it is you do best and how it will fit into the company’s overall mission, goals, and approach. Your summary should deploy your chosen keywords to describe your best traits, and it should answer the hiring manager’s number-one question: “Why do we need this person on the team?”

Talk up your accomplishments.

Listing your former job duties on your resume is a great way to land a job – in the previous century. Today, employers want to know what you’ve accomplished, not what you’ve been assigned.

Under each former job listing, name your top two to three accomplishments in a single sentence. Focus on specific, measurable accomplishments. “In the first six months, I increased sales output in our department by 30 percent” is a much more powerful statement than “responsible for finding new B2B sales contacts.” Hiring managers are far less interested in what you were assigned than in what you did to complete those tasks.

At Marquee Staffing, our SoCal recruiters will help you ensure that the resume you send to your dream employer puts you in the ideal position for an interview. Contact us today to learn more.

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