The Best Way to Stand Out is to Get to the Essential Answer Most Quickly: What Can You Do for Me?

About 20 seconds

That’s, on average, how long a hiring manager will spend looking at your resume. Don’t expect any sort of thorough examination of qualifications and character. Don’t expect them to connect any of the dots. That falls completely on you.

What’s the biggest mistakes people make?

Outside of egregious factual errors and glaring typos, many people don’t know how to use their past experience as a selling tool to express what they can do for the company they’re looking to work for. Often you just get a laundry list of responsibilities that really says nothing about achievements, abilities to meet goals or even general problem-solving and critical thinking. It shows you can check off a list, but employers don’t want to have to create that laundry list for you. They’re focused on letting you know what they expect to get out of you then letting you go out and get it.

Get Specific

The first thing you can do to improve your resume is make sure it does a few things very well: conveys your experience, your achievements and provides a few specific examples of how you’ve performed very well. The specific examples really make the resume stick out. These are the things that get remembered because they’re unique and entry points for further discussion (i.e., interview)

Think about a Video Resume

More and more hiring managers are looking at videos of prospective hires. This won’t work well with some larger corporations that mine your resume for certain qualifications, but it can work to supplement a traditional resume in this case.

About NextGen

NextGen is the brainchild of longtime telecom professionals with nearly 50 years of experience and millions of dollars in Telecom Recruiting Services. We focus on establishing long term relationships with our clients and candidates so we can recruit the best and the brightest in the telecom industry. This ‘quality over quantity’ approach is at the heart of everything we do and has resulted in successful job placements at Fortune 1000 firms worldwide.

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