What Is a Resume? Meaning, Definition + Tips

A resume is your own personal marketing tool that highlights the academic and professional skills, expertise, and experience you have to offer an employer.  Candidates create and submit resumes to land job interviews.

Successful candidates employ targeted marketing by using the job description and their own research to tailor their resume to the employer’s needs and wants.

Television ads from Disneyland Resort are good examples of targeted marketing. Today, Disneyland Resort offers many diverse experiences at its theme parks. One can enjoy their simulator ride Soaring Around the World, thrilling roller coasters like Space Mountain or Matterhorn, or a show like Great Moments with Mr Lincoln. But with demand high for Star Wars experiences, Disneyland Resort’s commercials continue to spotlight their Star Wars-themed attractions.

So must you craft a resume that markets the specific skills, expertise, and experiences your prospective employer needs in a candidate. As a result, writing effective resumes takes time, and you’ll write each one to match the job description and attract the employer.

There are many different ways to format and style a resume, but you should always include:

• Your contact information.
• Job title.
• A profile, summary or objective.
• Education.
• Titles, employment dates, and lists of duties or accomplishments for jobs held during the last 10 years.

Resumes for Remote Job Applications

Since the hiring process often begins with an online job application, employers receive far too many resumes to review. Employers rely on applicant tracking systems (ATS) to identify the most qualified candidates to find attractive candidates to interview.

ATS software scans each resume for keywords from the job description. Recruiters then select the highest rated resumes to review and extend invitations to around 10 candidates for interviews.

Create with Applicant Tracking Software in mind

To have your resume score highly rated by ATS software, and increase your chances of getting interviews, it’s critical to read through each job description and find the major keywords used in a resume.

To do this, print the job description out and highlight the desired skills or expertise mentioned more than once in the job description. If you’re having trouble getting all those keywords on a page, you can break the one-page resume “rule” and extend your resume to 2 pages.

In addition to using keywords, it’s essential to match your past job titles to the job description as much as you can.

If you’re a translator, but the job title from the job description is “linguist”, list “linguist” as your job title throughout your resume. Likewise, if you’re a UX Writer and find a relevant job for a “Content Designer”, list your UX Writer job title as “Content Designer”.

If your resume mentions “customer service” experience, but you find “customer care” throughout the job posting, edit your resume so that it also says “customer care”.

Useful resume tools

If you want help looking for all the right keywords to include in your resume and how many times to have them, there are plenty of online tools to help you. Jobscan will scan both your resume and the job description, score your resume based on how many keywords you use, and offer suggestions for improvements.

You can paste the job description on Teal, and they’ll return all the keywords separated by hard and soft skills with the number of times they appear in the job post. You can also create an ATS-friendly resume on the site or download a template to write your resume off-site.

Avoid graphic focused resumes

Since graphic resumes may not be ATS-friendly, designers, such as graphic designers and UX/UI designers, may need a graphically designed pdf version of their resume and one created as a Word doc.

Suppose you are a freelancer and applying to jobs via email, as many translators do. In that case, you probably don’t need to worry about sending an ATS-friendly resume (you would want to focus more on your proposal). Job applications submitted at networking events or in-person also don’t need to be ATS-friendly.

However, they should still be targeted at the employer or industry as much as possible.

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