Easy ways to improve your resume

Whether you’re a fresh college graduate or you’ve been out in the workforce for the last few years, building or reshaping your resume can seem like a daunting task. Obviously, you’re more than familiar with the various accomplishments of your professional career, but you’re having a little trouble organizing them on a single piece of paper that will constitute as your resume.

Crafting your resume doesn’t have to be as mentally draining or time-consuming as you might think. It can be fairly simple: Here are three things to keep in mind while shaping your resume:

Short and sweet
It’s a good rule of thumb to keep the content of your resume limited to whatever will fit on one page. It’s understandable that you don’t want to leave anything out, but trying to squeeze too much can be a problem, too. Even if you’ve had a lot of jobs, sometimes strategically picking the right ones to include on a resume can go a long way in getting yours from the original pile of resumes to the short stack that made the first round of cuts.

“People forget that a resume is a marketing tool,” said Markey Read, a professional career consultant, during an interview with the University of Vermont. “It’s something that should promote your best self. You don’t need to have every single job on there, and you don’t need to go back more than 10 or 15 years.”

Do not tell a lie
Showing off your valuable experience in the field is never a bad thing, but embellishing or flat out making stuff up can be problematic down the road. You’re better off sticking to the things that you have legitimately accomplished. Don’t pretend to be an expert in something you are not.

Follow the standard
There a few loose rules that you should follow when you’re assembling your resume. To begin with, don’t use a font that will distract the reader from the material you’ve chosen to include as part of your resume. Stick to basic formatting rules that will make your resume easy to read. You want to stand out from the rest of the crowd, regardless of what career path you are on, but don’t do it by putting your resume on bright, pink paper or by using size-48 font.