Whether you've found yourself facing the need to hunt for a new role or simply want to be proactive in case a great opportunity arises, keeping your resume in tip-top shape is always a smart professional move. However, if you haven't had to worry about updating your resume for a while, it's important to ensure your document is in line with modern conventions.
Along these lines, here are four key considerations to ponder if you're thinking about giving your resume a bit of a makeover — reflecting both some of the new resume principles that have emerged in the market, as well as a few tried-and-true approaches that can enhance your success.
1. Out With the Old, In With the New
Resumes serve as advertisements, not autobiographies. There’s simply no way you can pack everything you’ve ever done professionally into a mere page or two if you’ve got 15–20 years of experience under your belt. Nor should you.
Start your cleanup by ensuring your resume focuses heavily on your recent experience and accomplishments while downplaying or eliminating roles from the more distant past. Not only will this save precious space, but it also tunes into the reality that most recruiters don’t give much weight to achievements that are decades old.
Employers want candidates whose best days are ahead of them, not behind them. As a result, people who seem to be resting on their laurels aren't going to get the same level of consideration as people who have been crushing it in their recent roles.
As for whether to eliminate all your older jobs, as some experts suggest, there's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all rule in that regard. It depends a lot on your background and specific career path. For example, if you started your career working for some high-profile companies back in the 1990s, it’s smart to mention those roles. Try name-dropping the companies and referencing your work there without diving too deep into the day-to-day details. Or suppose you have worked for a single company for many years. In that case, you may still want to cite your range of experience, without devoting much space to explaining each early-career role.
Regardless of the situation, there's no question that the bulk of a resume should emphasize your most recent accolades and accomplishments. The farther you go back, the more you should scrutinize your prior experience and refine it accordingly.
2. Refresh Your Contact Details
In addition to trimming down your work experience, now might also be a great time to bring your resume in line with several modern resume-writing conventions. To start, you can ditch your physical street address. Employers rarely (if ever) contact people by snail mail these days. And in some cases, listing your full address can backfire, leading to what I call commute discrimination — where employers shy away from candidates who live far away, fearing they’ll be chronically late for work.
In light of this, it’s usually best to list the broader metro area where you live (e.g., Seattle, WA) or to eliminate this information and provide your email address and phone number. Additionally, given the substantial role that LinkedIn often plays in the modern hiring process, many people now include their LinkedIn address at the top of their resume.
However, make sure you've created a customized LinkedIn address instead of settling for the long, randomly generated ones LinkedIn assigns users when they first join the site. How do you do this? Run a search on "Customize Your URL" in the LinkedIn Help menu, and the site will provide you with quick steps to create your own unique address.
3. Drop the Clichés And Be Yourself
Another place where it might make sense to improve your resume effectiveness? Go back through your current document, hunt for and remove any clichés. Hiring managers often point out that most resumes (and cover letters) today overflow with vague, shopworn and forgettable language — a phenomenon exacerbated by the growing use of AI. So, if your current resume contains terms like “dynamic,” “results-oriented,” “big picture” or “self-starter,” I'd encourage you to remove them and try to come up with more interesting and creative word choices to make your point.
As an example, I recently came across a customer service professional who kicked her resume summary off with a statement about how she had “10 years of expertise dealing with frustrated customers, making them feel heard and restoring their faith in the company’s brand.” Alternatively, I worked with a data analyst who started his resume with a summary describing his passion for "telling stories with numbers" and how he loved to "pore through piles of data to find the meaningful insights needed to help the executive team make critical strategic decisions."
Love it or hate it, this kind of language stands out from the crowd and shows a lot more personality than the average resume. And it prevents you from sounding exactly like everybody else.
4. Show, Don't Tell
Last but not least, if your resume is feeling a bit stale, take a step back and ask yourself: are you just telling people what you can do, or are you showing it? That shift can make all the difference.
Far too many job hunters use valuable resume space by repeating their job descriptions and outlining the tasks and responsibilities each of their roles entailed. However, when you stop and think about it, almost any other serious candidate you're competing with is going to have held similar responsibilities to yours.
Take accounting managers — most of them have managed accounts payable and receivable. And any experienced nonprofit professional is going to have engaged in strategic planning, fundraising and team leadership. If you want to set yourself apart, show the impact. Highlight the RESULTS you delivered and show the difference you made in each role.
One technique is to put yourself in the hiring manager's shoes, reading each resume bullet and asking "Okay, so what?" at the end of each one. You'll quickly realize how many resume statements fizzle rather than sizzle. If you say that you improved a company's efficiency, for example, recognize that the reader won't know if you only saved a dollar — or if you saved $10,000 — unless you tell them.
Even if you can't quantify certain achievements in monetary form, consider including a percentage that shows how much you improved things over the prior method. Or a timeline showcasing the amount of effort it took. Or some specific details about the clients you worked with or the size of the teams with which you collaborated.
Almost any "quantification" in resume bullets is better than nothing. The only foolproof way to set yourself apart from your competition is to show future employers the outcomes you achieved rather than simply listing all the mundane tasks and responsibilities that led to them.
So, there you have it. Amongst a sea of often-conflicting resume advice, the above recommendations represent some of the most simple and straightforward changes you can make if you want to take your resume to the next level and ensure it's in line with current conventions!