Recruiters only review each resume that they receive for an average of 7.4 seconds. In other words, they’re much more likely to skim your resume than actually read it.
This is understandable, as there are typically dozens of applications submitted whenever an open position becomes available. For particularly high-paying or otherwise attractive job opportunities, employers often get over a hundred applications. There just isn’t enough time for hiring managers to thoroughly review every resume that lands on their desk.
So, your resume must make a good impression quickly in order to catch the attention of hiring managers and generate interview callbacks. This requires a clean design as well as concise, effective writing.
If you’re having trouble with formatting, word choice, or any other aspect of writing a resume, the examples featured below can provide you with some invaluable inspiration and guidance.
Why Use Resume Examples?
The process of writing a resume can be overwhelming. How are you supposed to condense your entire professional life down to a single page? Which details should be included? What can be left out? From your work experience to your skill set to your education and training, there’s a lot of information that your resume needs to cover. Where do you even start?
This is what makes resume examples so helpful. After seeing exactly what a resume should look like, you’ll have a better idea of what to do with your own resume. If you’re able to use resume examples for your specific occupation, you’ll have a reference for which words can be used to best describe your past job responsibilities as well.
Top Resume Examples for 2023
Resume Writing Best Practices
While resume examples can serve as a useful guide, you certainly shouldn’t copy them word-for-word. Indeed, every career is unique. Learn what you can from resume examples, and then use those insights to customize your resume for your specific qualifications and goals.
Even with the help of resume examples, you still might struggle with the writing process. In that case, the following tips can assist you with producing original content for your resume that impresses hiring managers and improves your odds of making it to the interview stage:
- Concision is key: Again, hiring managers have a lot on their plate. If your resume looks like a wall of text, there’s a good chance that they’ll get frustrated and quickly move on to their next option. Instead, you should make your resume easier to digest by using short paragraphs and bulleted lists to add white space.
- Use the active voice: In case you’re unfamiliar with this term, here’s a quick grammar lesson — a sentence written in the active voice is structured so that the subject is performing the verb on the object, while in the passive voice the object receives an action performed by the subject. For example, “I led the company’s sales team” is written in active voice, and “The company’s sales team was led by me” is written in passive voice. In general, using the active voice will make the meaning of your sentences more clear and allow you to remove unnecessary words.
- Avoid resume cliches: As mentioned above, you may be competing with well over a hundred other people whenever you apply for a job. To stand out from all this competition, it helps to avoid using the same language that many of the other applicants are using in their resumes. Phrases like “team player” and “detail-oriented” are so common that they don’t even mean anything to hiring managers at this point. Check out the 20 most frequently used words in Indeed’s CV database to find other phrases you should consider replacing in your resume.
- Include measurable results: Whenever possible, use numbers to highlight how effective you were at your previous jobs (e.g. write “I exceeded my annual sales target by an average of 137%” rather than “I consistently exceeded my sales targets”). This is another way to set your resume apart from others, and it provides hiring managers with a more precise understanding of what you are capable of.
- Optimize for ATS: Most employers now use applicant tracking system (ATS) software to automate the first part of the hiring process. This software works by analyzing each resume to see how well it matches what the employer is looking for — if their ATS platform doesn’t rank your resume high enough, the hiring manager might not even review it at all. Read the job description thoroughly to determine what the employer is likely using as keywords on their ATS platform, then see if there are any adjustments you could make to your resume to include these keywords. Tweaking a job title here and a responsibility description there may be able to significantly improve your ranking.
