3 Ways a Resume Can Say More With Less

When most consider what should go into their resume, it tends to snowball. The document tends to become a word salad dumping ground that not only includes every duty ever performed, it also tends to explain it with an "unparalleled cacophony of superfluous locutions" (see what I did there?) Theoretical physicist and Hair Club for Men “after” model Albert Einstein once said: “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” Well, an effective resume shrewdly boils down that complex professional history to deliver the payload with efficiency and quickness. Here are 3 quick down-n-dirty strategies you can employ today to increase the effectiveness of your resume submission.

Shorten Those Paragraphs

If you want to go through the motions of looking for a job, yet guarantee no one even reads the name on your resume, give them a resume littered with overly long paragraphs. That content dense behemoth will literally scare off your reader as soon as they lay eyes it. Remember to consider your audience. This is not a professor reading your research paper. Nor is it your client reading a proposal. YOUR reader has already seen 107 poorly written resumes where 90% of the candidates were not even qualified.

Paragraphs of some sort are usually part of a good resume’s strategy. But shorter paragraphs tell your reader’s subconscious that your resume will be less work to navigate. By definition it will add more white space, which rests the eye and helps your reader absorb the resume’s information. Research performed at Wichita State university concluded that “properly using whitespace between paragraphs and in the left and right margins can increase comprehension up to 20%.”

Word count may vary, depending upon font size and word selection, but keep it to 4-5 lines or so, but never more than 7-8 in a crunch. This will ensure your hiring managers and recruiters don’t summarily dismiss your resume at a glance.

Reduce Sentence Length

Okay, we’ve visually put ourselves in a better position to grab the reader’s attention. But now we have to keep it. And long run-on sentences are not the way to do it. Exceeding ideal sentence length causes your reader’s focus to drift. I once had a client that sent me a resume for review that had an 85+ word sentence. Of course wanted to send over Sentence Security (a division of the Grammar Police) to track him down, detain him, and charge him with assault with intent to bore his readers to tears.

Overworked recruiters and hiring managers are already exhausted from dredging through those dozens of other resumes. They are just itching for an excuse to toss yours. Keep sentences to 21-25 words when you can. Separate concepts into their own sentences where possible. Minimizing the use of articles is also an acceptable tactic in the resume writing world, so take advantage of it. Structuring powerful, yet compact prose is a valuable skill that keeps the resume engaging and easy to comprehend.

Trim Off Non-relevant Content

This one seems a bit obvious, but it speaks to a layperson’s tendency to want to “get it all in”. Not every move you have ever made in life needs to appear in the resume. Let’s consider the resume’s end goal. Its purpose is to communicate a high degree of qualification to the reader, drawing interest to learn more about a potential match in an interview. It is not to tell one’s life story. So let's say you're seeking a position as a VP of finance role where they expect you to “Prepare and present monthly financial budgeting reports, including monthly P&L, forecast vs. budget, and weekly cash flow by division”. The decision maker doesn’t need to know you were 2nd in command of paperclip distribution 28 years ago, do they?

Now, content elimination is not the easiest concept for most to deal with. It is sometimes difficult to eliminate content representing time invested simply because it means nothing to your reader. But if you want that interview, you must take an honest and sobering look at each and every item in the resume to gauge its merit in meeting the position's requirements. If it is of low relevance or happened 25-30 years ago, chances are you don’t need it.

William Mitchell is the owner of and lead writer at The Resume Clinic (A+ rating with BBB Online Reliability Program). He holds the CPRW designation with 25 years of resume writing excellence. His portfolio of success includes 1000s of targeted, strategy-rich private sector and federal resume and cover letter packages in every industry and sector, as well as LinkedIn profiles and executive bios for a thoroughly satisfied and loyal client base.