Saturday, November 9, 2024

‘Make it boring,’ ex-Google recruiter reveals secret to making best resume

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Simple fashion resumes may sound boring but they can really impress your potential employers and increase your chances of hiring in return. While hunting for jobs, crafting resumes that showcase your skills and past achievements in best light becomes super important. People spend hours refining it and even seek expert opinions to make it through. But in the end, simplicity is what actually may matter the most, a former Google recruiter has suggested.

Holding 15 years of experience while hiring candidates for tech giants like Google, Apple, Samsung and Nvidia, Stefanie Fackrell suggests one should keep their resumes basic, simple and classic.

He even insisted, “Make it boring.”

Sounding weird, right? However, the former recruiter has a solid reason for that.

Prioritising clean text over charts, colours, graphs and pictures is the key to making an efficient resume, she indicates.

“When I worked at Google, I saw a lot of artistic resumes with charts and Google colours,” Fackrell said.

“Instead of writing a list of titles and accomplishments, they’d split their resume into columns and quadrants. By creating these colourful resumes, you’re just being a little gimmicky. Some of these resumes are also not easily readable, which makes the applicants’ qualifications harder to discern,” she adds.

She stresses that a resume should be built to tell your professional story in a compelling way within 10 to 60 seconds. It also means that it should not exceed two pages.

“A resume is showing you in a 10-to-60-second format on paper,” she said. “It’s important to tell a compelling story through your resume, making sure it is clear and to the point. While listing your accomplishments is crucial, the resume should not be more than two pages long,” she said.

She highlights another important aspect of the resume in an interview with CNBC. She says people don’t focus enough on listing their past achievements in their resumes while they tend to focus more on responsibilities, which may raise concerns among the potential recruiters.

(With inputs from agencies)

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