In most job interview situations, your resume will provide your potential employer with his or her first impression of you. If your resume makes a good first impression, you will move on to the next step in the hiring process.

If not, your resume will likely be filed and you will never have the opportunity to progress to an actual interview. For this reason, it is essential that you take the time to create a resume that will make the first impression you need it to make.

Stay Clear and Concise

Before you even start writing your resume, you need to be clear on what your objectives are. This means having a solid idea of the type of job that you want and the types of skills needed to obtain that job. By having a clear idea of the job you are hoping to get, you can structure the rest of your resume around this objective.

When actually creating your resume, be clear about your objectives as well as the talents you can offer to the company. Don’t go into a great amount of detail about these talents – you can do that at your interview. Rather, provide the potential employer with a brief overview. Creating bulleted lists with short sentences is generally the best way to go. Remember, your potential employer will be scanning over dozens of resumes. Make it easy for him or her to read the highlights of what you offer to the company.

Use Action Words

Your resume should also contain action words such as monitored, managed, prepared, and developed. Not only will this help your resume stand out, it will also make it more likely to be picked out by the computerized resume scanners many companies are now using. With these scanners, the hiring manager inputs certain words that relate to the position and the computer searches for these words on the resume. If there are no matches, you resume will be overlooked.

Do Your Homework

You may very well have a number of skills and talents, but not all of them are necessarily valuable to the company. Do your homework so you are aware of what the company does and what it is looking for in the person it is hiring. Be sure to highlight these strengths in your resume in order to match the needs of the company.

By following these simple tips, you will be more likely to get an interview. From here, it is up to you to “sell” yourself to a potential employer.