When you apply for a job, you list as many achievements as possible to get your resume noticed. Many people also add creative elements such as their pictures, borders and backgrounds to their resumes. While all this attracts the attention of recruiters, there’s one mistake that jobseekers make over and over again in their resumes, which eventually leads to their rejection. Former Amazon recruiter Lindsay Mustain, who has looked at ‘literally a million’ resumes, shares what jobseekers can do to stand out.
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While talking to CNBC Make It, Mustain said that jobseekers provide generic statements that fail to give insights into what they actually accomplished on the job. She described them as ‘Miss America answers’ or the ones she’d hear in a pageant. She further shared that this mistake is common ‘from the junior level all the way up to the C-suite’.
Mustain also shared tips on how to avoid writing ‘Miss America answers’ in a resume by quoting an example. She told CNBC Make It that jobseekers can quantify and list their accomplishments instead of writing ‘I had stakeholder meetings with people’. She further added that such statements are ‘like a glorified job description’ and look ‘like somebody who’s filling a seat’.
She quoted another example of how jobseekers can make their resume stand out. She shared that if somebody is fixing tickets on a help desk, they can say, “I’ve solved 30 customers’ problems a day.” They can even quantify it further by saying, “Thirty problems a day, 20 days a month, 12 months per year is 7,200 problems solved altogether.”
{{/usCountry}}She quoted another example of how jobseekers can make their resume stand out. She shared that if somebody is fixing tickets on a help desk, they can say, “I’ve solved 30 customers’ problems a day.” They can even quantify it further by saying, “Thirty problems a day, 20 days a month, 12 months per year is 7,200 problems solved altogether.”
{{/usCountry}}Mustain believes that adding more metrics and analytics to your resume makes it more impressive. This is because recruiters’ eyes go straight to the numbers while going through hundreds of applications. Mustain further told the outlet that a resume should be ‘results-based’ as this will give recruiters a fair idea about how much value the particular individual added to their previous employer.