Simple Resume Format

Simple Resume Do’s & Dont’s

January 4, 2019 By Simple Resume Team

In our recent article, we talked about making a grand first impression. People that can make great first impressions generally find themselves in better situations and living better lives. Meaningful conversations, long-lasting relationships, and even employment opportunities are all known to be generated from the beauty of a great first impression. These impressions are critical in the hiring process, as a job interview is the first impression to a hiring manager and the resume is the first impression to an applicant tracking system (ATS). To round things out to make sure your 2019 career goals come to fruition, here are some Resume Do’s from the Simple Resume Team.

Use Bullet Points

Bullet points are quintessential elements that are needed within a basic resume format. Choosing to create a bulleted list of your accomplishments within your resume instead of writing in paragraph form helps to create aesthetic appeal and break up your text. With bullet points, you have the opportunity to organize, highlight, and separate your skills, accomplishments, and job duties. Make sure you do your research and create your basic resume outline with bullet points containing industry-specific action verbs to ensure you are making an argument for yourself as a good hire!

Optimize Your Simple Resume

Resumes have to be optimized strategically in order to make it to hiring managers’ desks. This is due to the fact that applicant tracking system (ATS) technology is now being implemented by a substantially great amount of companies worldwide. The key to optimization is plugging in keywords to ensure that your resume stands out amongst your competition (see how our services can create a simple and professional resume for job search effectiveness). Study the job description, take note of specific keywords that are mentioned, and make an effort to include them in your resume.

Quantify Your Accomplishments

Career accomplishments have to be quantified in order to be considered qualifiable for many of today’s positions. Noting and detailing your stats in the duration of your employment gives hiring managers an idea of your dedication and work ethic. It shows a level of commitment and promise as an employee. Quantifying your accomplishments can mean a ticket into the hiring manager’s office for an interview! Quantify your resume as best as you can will give you the best chance at landing employment opportunities.

Check your Grammar

By far the most obvious and worst mistake you can make on a simple resume. Now that you’ve misspelled words such as “organized” and “directed”, you can kiss that job goodbye. It’s not that the hiring manager doesn’t believe you can spell. We all make mistakes. He believes that you don’t know how to check your work and will submit a project even if it contains fallacies. Do your resume and job aspirations a favor and check your grammar, it may end up being a job offer in the end.

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A first impression is everything. People that are skilled at making great first impressions generally find themselves living better lives. A great first impression can generate meaningful conversations, long-lasting relationships, and even employment opportunities. First impressions are critical in the hiring process, as a job interview is the first impression to a hiring manager and the resume is the first impression to the applicant tracking system (ATS). Having said that, in our edition of Resume Do’s and Don’ts, here are some Resume Don’ts from the Simple Resume Team.

1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd Person

How about “no person”. A simple resume should never have any pronouns within its text. This is a simple resume law. The resume should serve as a summary or an introduction of you as an applicant, not a narrative or autobiography. Ex: In his previous position, Cory analyzed complex reports and developed a company strategy for optimal efficiency. When writing his accomplishment, instead of beginning the sentence as “Cory analyzed complex reports…”, “He analyzed complex reports…”, or “I analyzed complex reports…”, Cory should start the sentence off as “Analyzed complex reports…”.

Unemployed

Don’t give any impression that you were unemployed for any period of time. Unemployment raises red flags to hiring managers. They may wonder what have you been doing in the meantime, why you were unemployed, and your overall work ethic. Use a filler such as any personal project or volunteer work that can show that you were busy and cover any employment gaps.

“References Available Upon Request”

Employers will ask for references if they need them. As an applicant, you are already expected to have references available upon request. Implementing this phrase in your resume takes up a valuable amount of space. Avoid stating the obvious.

Negative Words In Your Simple Resume

This should go without saying. Listing your limitations will automatically disqualify you from any position in the job market. Avoid saying what you “can’t” do and focus on what you “can” do. Detail your accomplishments and capabilities to elevate your image as a great potential hire.

Too Much Info

Including any sensitive personal information is not only an instant disqualification, but it doesn’t do any good in your job hopes. In fact, it can do you much more harm than good, as you will leave yourself vulnerable to identity theft and someone having your information in their hands. Don’t include your date of birth, social security number, or personal interests in your resume. Keep it simple and avoid doing this on your resume.

One Page Resume Layout | Resume Writing Tips For A Simple Resume

December 5, 2018 By Simple Resume Team

There is a general consensus in today’s employment world that no resume should be longer than a page when submitting for a job application. This proves to be true for entry-level candidates and those with less than 10 years of experience. Hiring managers that are looking to fill entry and associate-level positions don’t want to waste their time reading through a lengthy resume when they can find a quality candidate with a simple one page resume layout with the same qualifications.

Though some of these candidates may have a fair amount of work experience, employers want a one page resume that is clear, concise, and quick to the point. Creating a short and effective job resume outline can BOOST your chances of landing an interview. Here, we have provided resume writing tips on how to cut your simple resume down to a one page resume after you have written and compiled all of your work experience together.

Adjust The Layout

The typical standard for one page resume layout is to set the margins of your word document to 1” on each side of your document. This creates a design that is appealing to employers and leaves a great amount of white space so the information within your one page resume does not look crammed. In certain cases where you may have a lot of important information that needs to be included, you can decrease these margins down to ½”. When decreasing the size of your margins, it is always best practices to first decrease the top and bottom margins of the page if necessary. Start with the top and bottom margins before you move to the side margins.

Include Only Relevant Positions

A hiring manager that is looking to hire for an entry-level accounting position does not want to know that you worked for a grocery store in the deli department during your college days. Focus on including only relevant work experience and skills on your simple resume. This will cut out a lot of unnecessary and irrelevant information that could extend the length of your one page simple resume and hurt your chances at getting an interview (see the importance of including relevant information in a resume here).

Condense Your Information

The utilization of bullet points in your basic resume format serves two purposes; it makes your one page resume layout look neat and it works strategically to condense the information in your resume. Use bullet points instead of paragraphs to break up the text. Use bullet points to highlight one accomplishment at a time instead of explaining your career in paragraph form.

Cut Your Font Down

If you’re using a size 14 font, you may want to try to decrease it to a size between 10 and 12. This allows you to downsize your resume while still making it readable enough for hiring managers. Aside from your name, which should be set to a minimum of 14, diminishing the size of your resume font can free up a tremendous amount of space on your resume.

Simple Resumes | The Layout That Will Land Your Dream Interview

October 17, 2018 By Simple Resume Team

Simple Resumes can come in many shapes, forms, and formats. Before the implementation of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), creative resume layouts were considered intriguing and visually appealing to potential employers. Now, due to the heavy-handed use of ATS, a creative resume format would be quickly filtered out of the job pool before they even reach the eyes of hiring managers.

Hiring managers tend to want to see a simple and professional resume format. Features such as flashy fonts, colorful paper, and candidate headshots can potentially work against the candidate by creating bias. Due to this, it is important to keep the simple job resume layout basic while focusing on the content (download one of our simple resume examples to see how your resume should be formatted).

Simple Font

The specific font that you use to write your content can have an effect on your job search. Hiring managers and recruiters tend to scrutinize candidates heavily, and choosing to use the wrong font can prove to be detrimental. Making a great first impression is important in not only impressing the employer, but also in moving forward towards your goal of a dream interview. Certain fonts can come off as unprofessional and not display well on white paper.

There is sometimes debate on whether or not to use serif or sans serif fonts. Many may say that serif fonts should be avoided as they are not as sharp or professional looking as san serif fonts. However, either or can be chosen for your writing.

Avoid using fonts such as Comic Sans, Lucida Console, Brush Script, and any font that looks too complicated or widely spaced out on paper. Studies show that some of the best simple fonts to use for simple resumes are Book Antiqua, Garamond, Cambria, and Calibri.

It is also a general rule of thumb to use a font size between 10-12 when writing a simple resume for two reasons; too small of a font can affect readability, creating difficulty for hiring managers to look through your information, and too large of a font could be perceived as a lack of content and information to share with the employer.

White Space

There is a standard rule that is simple to follow when it comes to white spacing on your resume. Similar to bullet points, white space is a technique that increases the chances of a hiring manager being able to immediately see your accomplishments.

When creating a simple resume format, your margins should be set to one inch on each side of the document to create a fresh, balanced simple resume. This eliminates the practice of cramming too many words into white space, which can negatively affect the readability of simple resumes.

Bullet Points

Your basic resume design should not reflect the attributes of an essay. Bullet points are critical to simplifying your information and making your accomplishments stand out within the first few initial seconds. They give you the opportunity to organize, highlight, and separate your skills, accomplishments, and job duties.

Choosing to create a bulleted list of your accomplishments within your simple resume format instead of writing in paragraph form helps to create aesthetic appeal and break up your text. This can have a positive effect on the readability of your document.

Simple resumes get interviews. Bullet points have significant importance in the writing process. Your content should not reflect the attributes of an essay in any fashion. With bullet points, you have the opportunity to organize, highlight, and separate your skills, accomplishments, and job duties.

Relevancy

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is including irrelevant work experience, which negatively impacts simple resumes in several ways. It affects readability, decreases the value of your content, and takes up space. For example, if you are applying for an accounting role, simplify your writing to only include accounting information. By doing this, hiring managers will be able to see relevant, important points about your employment history.

Simple resumes will give you a better chance of landing an interview since they are clear, concise, and consistent. Utilize this information to propel your writing to BOOST your chances of creating a layout that will land your dream interview.

Simple Resume Layout Techniques To Beat The ATS

October 29, 2017 By Simple Resume Team

Understanding how to formulate a simple resume layout that can successfully beat applicant tracking systems (ATS) comes with one having intensive knowledge of ATS functions. It is of critical importance to not only have knowledge on how ATS works, but also how to design your content for optimization and performance.

ATS technology is used by most large organizations and a growing number of smaller operations to help hiring managers filter out unqualified candidates and make the hiring process more efficient.

Applicant tracking systems scan resumes for relevant keywords pertaining to the job description and will come up with a list of qualified candidates that internal hiring teams can reach out to. On record, applicant tracking systems eliminate 75 percent of them from the job candidacy pool. This stat alone is alarming to jobseekers as only 25 percent of job applicants are successfully able to get their documents in the hands of actual human eyes!

There are numerous techniques available that can strategically help you perform better against an ATS, such as getting a cost-effective resume by hiring a professional resume writer. Not only will you be getting a cheap resume from an affordable simple resume writing service: Our certified writers are skilled at making sure all best practices are followed and implemented. If you’re not confident in your ability to beat an ATS, we specialize in offering low cost services to ensure your writing reaches a hiring manager. Aside from a hiring a writer, here are a few tricks that you can use to BOOST the appeal of your simple resume layout right away.

Optimize Your Simple Resume Header

Applicant tracking systems are computers that are designed to strategically scrutinize and filter simple resume layouts. It is important to format your header in a clear manner so as not to confuse the ATS, which can result in your professional document being filtered out immediately. Take extra care in making sure that your header lists your first and last name followed by your address, phone number, and email.

We are often asked by clients on whether or not it is proper etiquette to include their entire addresses (street names, unit numbers, etc.). The answer is yes (unless you’re looking to relocate for a role. Click here to learn more)! Applicant tracking systems are designed to geo-filter resumes by location. Including your complete location allows these systems to see where you are located and determine whether or not the position is a fit for you. After all, there is very little point in interviewing for a position that is a 4-hour commute from your home, especially if you’re not looking to commute!

Include A Professional Summary

A key area to optimize for maximum performance against the ATS is the professional summary. A professional summary is the short paragraph at the beginning that briefly details your title, experience, and skills. Every simple resume layout at the very minimum should contain a professional summary for optimization. Lead in with two to three sentences describing yourself as a professional and include as many pertinent keywords from the job description as possible. This signals to the ATS that you possess all the requisite skills for the job.

Insert An Areas Of Expertise Section

Compiling a list of 9 to 12 areas of expertise that most closely align with your skillsets and the type of positions you are looking to pursue is a great idea for applicant tracking system optimization. Areas of expertise are specific skills that are needed in order for you to carry out the daily responsibilities of the role. Not only is it a great idea to have those keywords on hand, but by listing them neatly on the document itself, you are giving applicant tracking systems the chance to parse your resume for those words and pass it along in the ‘good’ pile!

Understanding how to write a document that beats applicant tracking systems is pivotal in today’s age of the computerized application process. Although the ATS can sometimes eliminate candidates that are indeed well qualified for the role, hiring managers have very little time to scan through hundreds of professional documents and are relying more and more on the feedback they receive from these systems to make informed hiring decisions.

Taking the time to ensure that your document has all the elements necessary to beat applicant tracking systems and impress hiring managers is key to landing interviews for the positions you wish to pursue. Download our simple resume layout to see our format that is optimized for both applicant tracking systems and hiring manager eye appeal!