Resume Refresh

It’s a pretty common occurrence, really. You finally find the right role with the right boss and the right schedule, and what do you do? You park. Because you’ve finally gotten into a routine and rhythm that works for you and your family.

But then something changes. Your firm gets bought and your flexible schedule gets canceled. Your empathetic boss leaves and the new boss, managing from across the pond, doesn’t understand that you have a 6PM daycare pick up. You think hey, I’m at midlife, I want a job I actually care about that’s going to leave the world a little better than I found it. So you commit to a job search and dust off your old resume, which, thankfully, is backwards compatible from Windows 2008.

Too often I see the telltale signs of a dated, poorly-attended resume. And do you know what I think when I read it? This person does not care enough about this job to give this resume the attention it deserves and into Deleted Files it goes.

Here are a few tips if you are refreshing a several-years-old resume:

• Nothing says “I wrote this resume when Friends was still on the air” like Times New Roman. Try Arial, Lucida Sans or another modern font
• Home address? Not necessary. Everyone’s googable and home address is not a thing anymore. City and state are just fine. Recruiters are weary of out-of-town candidates.
• Make sure your LinkedIn Vanity Profile Name is in your contact information, it’s a hyperlink to a much richer profile of you. Just make sure it’s in good shape!
• I know you’ve worked for 20 years and have had many jobs, but stick to one page. Tighten the language, use your white and dark space well and this should not be hard. Eliminate any jobs that are not relevant to your current search or were very early in your careers. Simply list employer and dates of employment. No one needs to know the details of your Assistant Manager job at Ann Taylor Loft in 1999.
• Recruiters spend approximately 14 seconds on your resume, your “above the fold” needs to catch their eye and make sense. Connect the dots for them. Create a simple Objective or highlight key skills with bullet points.

So stop putting it off. Update that resume. And for goodness sakes run it through Grammarly and have at least three friends review it. Not only are you looking for eagle eye editing, but your friends (you know, the ones that you’ve known since you first drafted this resume) will give you the honest truth about how it reads and what it says about you.