In today’s competitive job market, making your resume stand out is crucial to landing an interview. Tailoring your resume according to the job description, listing all your skills and achievements a company seeks, and the years of experience you have in that particular field helps you get your resume noticed. While many people try to add creative elements such as their different fonts, colours, and backgrounds to make their resumes visually appealing, jobseekers make one mistake over and over again, which eventually leads to their rejection.
Elaborating on the same, former Amazon recruiter Lindsay Mustain, who has spent about two decades in talent acquisition and has gone through “literally a million” resumes, shared what the jobseekers miss out on in their resumes and what they can do to stand out.
During a conversation with CNBC Make It, Mustain stated that jobseekers provide simple statements that don’t give much insight into what candidates actually accomplished on the job. She labelled them ‘Miss America Answers’, or the ones she would imagine hearing in a pageant. She went on to say that this mistake is happening from the junior level, all the way up to the C-suite which is preventing jobseekers from standing out.
Further, the former Amazon recruiter shared tips on what Miss America answers are in a resume and how to avoid writing them. Mustain said that when it comes to a resume, candidates want to mirror the language of the job description to the extent that it portrays their experience accurately. However, candidates must avoid making general statements about the tasks they took on.
While speaking with the news portal, Mustain said that jobseekers can quantify and list their accomplishments instead of writing. Giving an example of a Miss America answer, she said, “I had stakeholder meetings with people’ is one such statement, and these kinds of descriptions don’t give a concrete sense of how job seekers were able to move their team forward.” She added that such general statements are like a ‘glorified job description’ and looks like somebody who is filling a seat.
She quoted another example of what can be a good metric to start with and how candidates can make their resume stand out. She shared that if somebody is fixing tickets on a help desk, they can state, “I’ve solved 30 customers’ problems a day.” They can even quantify it further by explaining what they were able to accomplish in a year. She explained, saying, “Thirty problems a day, 20 days a month, and 12 months per year are 7,200 problems solved altogether.”
Mustain said that adding more metrics and analytics to the resume makes it more impressive. This is because recruiters’ only have a few seconds to dedicate to one resume, and the benefit of quantifying the accomplishments is that recruiters’ eyes “go straight to the numbers” while going through hundreds of applications. By mentioning the metrics, the recruiters
Mustain concluded by saying that a resume should be ‘results-based’ so that recruiters get to know how much value the particular individual has added to their previous employers immediately.
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