Dark Data Agency

Strengthen your resume

  • Personal information
  • Experience
  • Education and training
  • Skills

After you create a resume with these basic sections, you can work on customizing it. Submitting a resume that is customized to align with a particular role you’re interested in can be more effective than submitting a general-purpose resume. This reading provides additional details about customizing your resume. The main focus is customizing the Experience section of your resume to become a better match for the roles you’re applying for.

Customize your resume  

A resume is a first impression. Recruiters and hiring managers select applicants to interview whose resumes describe people they can easily imagine doing the job. Two of the most effective methods of customizing a resume to enhance your perceived fit for a job are:

  • Adding job-relevant context to your skills using the STAR method
  • Matching your transferable skills to job requirements

Using these methods of customization helps to create a stronger connection between what you did in the past and what the job you’re applying for requires. You’ll probably create multiple customized versions of your resume when applying for different positions. Your goal is for recruiters and hiring managers to visualize YOU doing the job!

Add STAR power

You’re definitely the star of your resume! But in this case, STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. The STAR method is a structured way to respond to behavioral questions in interviews.You can also use the STAR method to present required skills in a resume more impactfully. The STAR method ensures valuable context is provided for the skills included in your resume by highlighting the actions you took and the results you achieved. 

Consider a job description for a marketing associate role that begins with: 

  • We are looking for a dependable, client service-oriented marketing associate with excellent communication, time-management, and organizational skills. 

Here’s an example of presenting organizational skills in a resume as a bulleted item with and without the STAR method. Which one appears to be more impactful? 

  • Without STAR method: Organized and shared reports in a timely manner
  • With STAR method: Implemented new formats to improve organization and weekly availability of reports for 35 team members
    • Situation: Reports were hard to read/find
    • Task: Improve the readability/availability of reports
    • Action: Created new formats for reports
    • Results: 35 people read/found reports more easily each week

Note: When you add STAR power to your resume, remember to adjust any wording for company size and culture. Mentioning a team of 35 is more relevant for a role in a small to medium-sized business than in a large company with teams numbering in the hundreds. When applying for a role in a larger company, you might substitute “for 35 team members” with “company-wide” so you don’t inadvertently exclude yourself from consideration.

The STAR method can also be used across multiple bulleted items in your resume. Using the previous example for organizational skills, if you were the person who identified the situation as an issue to be solved, you could have multiple bulleted items in your resume as follows:

  • Shared reports and identified ongoing issues with their readability and access (Situation)
  • Created new report formats to improve readability and availability (Task and Action combined)
  • Improved the organization and weekly availability of reports for 35 team members (Result)

Map transferable skills to job requirements

If you’re changing careers and newly entering the field of digital marketing and e-commerce, you can customize your resume to show how your skills developed in another field are an advantage to have in the role you’re applying for. 

For example, suppose someone with five years of experience as a high school teacher is applying for a marketing analyst position that requires the following skill: 

  • Work with teams to determine campaign profitability, Return on Investment (ROI), and other KPIs

Teaching is highly collaborative. Teachers constantly share information and standardize measurements to monitor student performance. Below are a few examples of bulleted items in a resume that map a teacher’s experience to the marketing job requirement of teamwork.

  • Adapt strategies for teamwork in education to enable marketing teams to determine and improve campaign performance (Transferable: teamwork to improve performance)
  • Coordinate and communicate with teams to establish uniform standards for KPI measurement (Transferable: standardized measurements)
  • Collaborate with teams to achieve desired customer behaviors and KPIs (Transferable: desired behaviors and outcomes) 

Although recent experience running campaigns and monitoring marketing KPIs might be lacking, a teaching job has important KPIs related to student success, such as:

  • Retention rates
  • Graduation rates
  • Grade point averages
  • Standardized test scores

Below is an example of a bulleted item in a resume that maps experience with educational KPIs to the job requirement of monitoring marketing-related KPIs.

  • Use and apply experience monitoring educational KPIs, like student retention and graduation, to gainfully monitor marketing KPIs, such as customer conversion and retention 

Format your resume

After you have completed the content and customization of your resume for a particular role or job, ensure that the format of your resume is error-free (no misspelled words) and has a clean look and feel. Limit your resume to one page and don’t include references in your resume. References should be in a separate document.

Personal information

Here are tips for the personal information section of your resume.

  • Your name should be the largest-sized font 
  • If targeting a specific location, include the city and state to indicate to prospective employers that you’re local to the area; otherwise, your email and phone number is sufficient.
  • (Optional) Add a link to your LinkedIn profile
  • (Optional) Add a photo—a media-savvy startup may place a higher value on a photo, but a more established company may not; follow what you perceive as the current culture of the prospective employer.

Experience

The Experience section is in reverse chronological order with your most recent job listed first.  

  • Use bullets instead of paragraphs; bulleted points are easier to scan and read
  • Include the name of each employer 
  • (Optional) Include the location of the employer; this may not be necessary if, for example, you were a remote worker
  • Include your job title
  • Include dates of employment as months and years; Example: May 2019 – August 2022
  • Use a consistent formatting pattern; Example: if you use bold for an employer, all employers should be in bold.
  • Don’t use ALL CAPS for anything

Education and training

List all degrees you have earned, but only the certificates that are relevant to the job. If you have partially completed a degree, you may include it with an anticipated completion date. Like the Experience section, these should be listed as bullets in reverse chronological order, or with the most relevant training first.

Skills

This section is reserved for advanced skills and areas of expertise. If you list a skill, anticipate questions that may probe your skill level during an interview.

  • Effective examples: JavaScript, SQL, Google Ads (not everyone has these skills) 
  • Less effective examples: Word, Excel (many people have these skills)

Key takeaways

Customize your resume. Aligning it to a specific role using the STAR method and mapping your transferable skills to job requirements will help you stand out for an interview. Format each section of your resume to ensure there are no errors and your resume is easy to read. Investing the time to customize and format your resume will help recruiters and hiring managers visualize you as the right person for the job.

Resources to create your resume

For help creating a resume, refer to the following resources: