Happy New Year!

I hope you’re not too hung over. I also hope you didn’t have to work on New Year’s Day, because that is never fun. Unless, of course, your job is fun. And if it’s not, that should be your number 1 New Year’s resolution: get a new job.

Okay, maybe fun is a little bit of a stretch. Nobody’s job is really all that fun. But you should be happy with your job. And all of the other things you promise yourself you will do to be a better person and to make your life more fulfilling, be it losing weight, learning a new language, traveling, starting to cook at home more often, all that is really not going to improve your life and your outlook as much as making sure the place you spend eight hours a day brings you some sort of satisfaction. One crucial element to get you that new job is focusing on your resume.

Make Getting a New Job Your New Year’s Resolution
If self-improvement is your goal, and that usually is the goal of resolutions, then a new job is the ultimate self-improvement device. You can have more money, more satisfaction, a new social group, and a new perspective. Those other resolutions pale in comparison to the all-around package of self-improvement that a new job can bring. Unfortunately, lots of other people have the same idea. Hiring does pick up in the new year, but that’s also when job hunters apply themselves. As a result, there is a sea of resumes in the inbox of most hiring people in January. Here are three ways you can stand out from the crowd.

Three Ways to Make Your Resume Stand Out in the New Year

1. Give Some Context

If it’s not immediately clear within the first line of a job description what kind of company you worked for, what your job was, and how large the company was, then you already have a bad resume. You need to give a clear understanding of your job to the reader before you give them any specifics. Specifics are useless free of context, because no one is going to be able to understand the specifics, or focus on what they mean, if they are using them to try and figure out what your job was. Most resumes fail at this. Providing a clear description allows hiring people to evaluate your accomplishments much more clearly. I know most people think this may be obvious, but it’s not. Read the first line in each of your resume’s job descriptions out loud. If an average educated person hears that description and still has no idea what you do, then you need to reevaluate.

2. Quantify Everything.

I can’t stress enough how much being vague hurts you on a resume, and yet everyone seems to think it’s a good thing. If you say you did something, and you didn’t say how many times you did it, then the person reading it is going to assume you did it once or twice and are putting it in your resume to make your job seem more impressive than it was. Everybody does this. So if you’re the one person in the stack of resumes that quantifies everything, you immediately jump to the top of the pile.

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3. Show the Result of What You Did.

Everyone puts what they did on their resume, but it’s the people who show how what they did affected the company that stand out. If you developed a new system for anything, then estimate how much time it saved. If you created a new piece of software, explain what functionality it added to the existing product. If you created a new email template, how much did it improve customer service? Demonstrating direct cause and effect relationships makes your accomplishments that much more impressive, and it shows they are real and substantive, and not just resume filler.

While other resolutions are going to require some seriously advanced discipline and dedication, finding a new job, in spite of the economy, is not nearly as difficult, not with Resume to Interviews at your side. We are constantly improving our processes, and adding services, including a second cover letter service. Hiring picks up after the holidays, so now is the time to make a resolution and stick with it. The first step to getting a new job is getting a new resume. So strike while your motivation is high, and check out our website.

– Jason B.