Recruitment Agency Staff Can Offer Professional Advice on Preparing a Resume
Whether a job seeker is a recent graduate or someone with several years of experience, looking for employment can be a simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting process. A job search requires a considerable investment of time and effort to complete a number of important steps, such as:
- Searching for and reviewing postings
- Researching the prospective employers
- Comparing skill sets to job requirements
- Weighing any options for possible relocation
- Assessing compensation /advancement potential
Yet perhaps the most important step in the entire process is the preparation of a resume and a covering letter to be submitted in response to postings/advertisements of interest. Because the resume and cover letter are often the first points of contact with prospective employers, individuals seeking those positions obviously want to present their candidacy is the best possible light in order to make a positive first impression. However, for many candidates, preparing their resume can be challenging; and this applies to inexperienced resume writers as well as those who have not prepared a resume for many years.
It should come as no surprise that one’s resume content must stand above the crowd, so to speak, as it is highly likely that many such applications will be received by the hiring managers or external agents responsible for candidate screening. Unfortunately, many ideally-qualified applicants can impede or negate their candidacy simply on the basis of their resumes; to this end, here are 10 common traps to avoid when building a resume:
- Spelling errors
- Grammatical errors
- Generic career goals
- Insufficient information
- Vague/nonspecific information
- Excessive length/too much detail
- Listing past duties vs. accomplishments
- Gaps in employment or education timelines
- Hard-to-read or overbearing fonts/font sizes
- Inaccurate or incomplete contact information
To avert such potentially debilitating errors, candidates may want to enlist the support of a recruitment agency professional to assist them in preparing a strong, accurate, and appealing resume. Consultants from Winters Technical Staffing, one of Toronto’s leading recruitment agencies, can offer professional advice and perspective on creating a resume that will stand out and encourage hiring managers/screeners to sit up and take notice.
How Recruitment Agency Professionals Help Refine Resumes and Cover Letters
When developing a resume and cover letter, it will be important to focus on the content as well as the format and length of these documents; while the specific content is vitally important to securing an interview, the extent of the information and its presentation will play key roles in determining whether that content is ever actually read by the recipient.
By collaborating with a recruitment professional from a reputable agency such as Winters Technical Staffing, job seekers can improve or strengthen their resumes/covering letters through the following means:
- Tailoring the content to a specific position or employer
- Emphasis on the quality of information, not the quantity
- Eliminating ambiguity that might raise questions or concerns
- Appropriate use of punctuation for proper sentence structure/flow
- Using language/grammar in their proper context (not to falsely impress)
- Third-party proofreading to check for spelling errors, content inaccuracies
- Proper margins, spacing, font size, and font type to attract reader attention
Obtaining the opinion and advice of a recruitment agency professional can be a beneficial investment of time and effort in developing, revising, or tailoring resumes and covering letters; this may also prove valuable in attracting the attention of prospective employers in light of the volume of resumes they can receive for a single job posting.
Contact Winters Today
Tap into the resources and experience of an established recruitment agency to develop a compelling resume and covering letter that will appeal to your targeted employers. Call Winters Technical Staffing, one of the leading recruitment agencies in Toronto for more than 50 years, at 1-877-495-7422 for additional information on how we can help with your job search efforts.