Ultimate Guide: How to Make a Resume that Stands Apart

This story travels back a few years when I awaited many job opportunities.

I was ready with a professional resume that was stuffed with information that would land me offers. But weeks went by where I got no callbacks and no replies for my application.

I had strong credentials but for some reason, the first offer never arrived.

Once a friend of mine took a glance at my resume and quickly said it was dull and was unnecessarily stacked. Without taking offense to that declaration, I reflected on its honesty.

It was true. My resume was professional, but it crammed in a lot of information. Moreover, it was just one among the others, not having any identity of its own.

Starting from scratch again, I sketched another resume, this time making sure it was informative with very little content, and sure enough, replies for my applications came soaring in.

In this article, I will go through the formats and approaches to make a successful resume and digital version of your resume which can be a true differentiator.

Key points

• Introduction
• Traditional approach of resume (what is resume + components)
• How does this resume stand out?
• What are the drawbacks of a traditional resume?
• How is getCREDIBLE slate different?
• Comparison table (traditional vs getCREDIBLE)
• Building your credibility with slate
• Leverage all channels to improve visibility
• Wrapping up
• FAQs

Traditional Approach of Resume

We all know the purpose of a resume, which is to sell your professional’s skills and secure a job interview. Traditionally, people have resorted to a conventional resume, with information including education, certifications, and other achievements in big details.

You can choose different formats to best represent your skills, within Chronological, Functional, and Combinational resume formats. All these formats vary in the way they structure the body of the resume, and in highlighting the content.

Here is an example of a chronological format resume to clue you in as to how traditional resumes work:

Summary
An exceptionally prudent and friendly dental assistant with 4+ years of successful experience working with dental offices and clients.

Professional History
Peterson Family Dentistry, Dental Assistant
July 2019–Present

• Clean and prepare treatment rooms
• Prepare patient to be seen by for dental treatment
• Answer common patient questions about dental procedures, treatments, and issues

E&H Dental, Office Assistant
August 2017–July 2019

• Organized client schedules
• Received patients upon arrival
• Handled client billing and paperwork
• By end of work experience, took on key dental assistant roles

Educational History
Little Rock Junior College
August 2014–June 2016
Certified Dental Assistant Program

Skills
Dental assistant skills include: DANB certification • X-ray certification • Denture impressions • Calming personality and demeanor • Hygienic • Minor oral surgery experience

How Does This Resume Stand Out?

There is undoubtedly a reason why this resume sticks to being the top choice for budding as well as grounded professionals. When people ask themselves how to make a CV they invariably turn to make the traditional one. Let’s find out why:

● Suitable Format - Selecting a format is dependent on your skills and experience. If you are a beginner to the professional world, you can pick a format that stresses more education and qualities rather than past experiences.

● Provides for Effective Skimming - Most resumes don’t get read beyond the first paragraph. The reader may lose interest, feel the resume doesn’t match their requirements.

Therefore, while formatting, you can set your resume to highlight just enough so that even when the reader is skimming through larger portions, they get an idea of what all are included.

● Pick your Design - Picking the ideal resume layout lets you present the matter more accurately fitting to the requirement.

While some professions require you to keep a very professional profile, some are more lenient where you can pick striking designs and fonts to garner more attention to your profile.

What are the Drawbacks of the Traditional Resume?

While we speak of traditional resumes with high regard as to how they facilitate job entry, they may lack some qualities that would ensure you better chances at securing a job. Let us view in detail some of these drawbacks:

● No Review from Network - It goes along with the first point, in that there is no option to bring in statements of individuals from your professional network to comment on your mentioned skills and qualifications. With its absence, the recruiter has no option but to take your resume at face value.

● Including too much Information - You want to avoid at all costs making your resume stuffy and conveying too much. And unfortunately, with a traditional resume, there are limitations to preventing that.

I get it, you cannot skip on the $20 certificate course you did on affiliate marketing or the 6-month session at a university learning psychology. But your resume should be designed to only provide information that becomes useful to your application. It is needless to include every single work and educational experience you’ve had.

● Requires a General Resume - When you make resumes to fit specific roles, you also need to have a master resume to access every single piece of information you have about yourself. This general list would contain the entire educational qualifications and work experiences. Otherwise, you will tend to forget to mention some qualifications or skills in the process.

Have you heard of digital version resume? The whole world has gone digital why not your resume? This is a new phenomenon that is catching up!

How is getCREDIBLE Slate Different?

getCREDIBLE is a professional platform that allows you to make a credible professional profile, in a digital format among other functions. This profile, Slate as we call it, is constructed on validated credentials and unsolicited reviews and carries out the necessary details of an individual.

As said before, one of the limitations of traditional resumes is that it does not validate your credentials.

getCREDIBLE steps out to assure professional credibility by engaging the professional network of each individual to drop reviews and ratings regarding the individual’s work performance and output.

It creates professional credibility by enabling professionals to get feedback of their work and generating ratings objectively using their proprietary engine. Additionally, since it is a digital slate, it creates more traction in the eyes of potential employers, than as opposed to a traditional resume.

Sounds interesting? You too can make your Digital Slate using getCREDIBLE. Try it for free today!

Comparison table

Building your credibility with Slate

One simple option is to request your folks from your professional ecosystem to provide feedback on your performance. LinkedIn offers this feature called recommendations. LinkedIn recommendations provide an insight into a professional’s skills, however, it has the following disadvantages:

Due to the above challenges, LinkedIn recommendations may not help much in establishing professional credibility. In their defense, LinkedIn is a professional networking portal and not a credibility platform and does a great job on that.

The other approach to establish credibility to do the following:

• Send a milestone of your accomplishment regularly (bi-weekly or monthly) to all folks in your professional ecosystem
• Get their feedback for each milestone
• Process their feedback to get a rating that easier for others to understand
• Keep all feedback anonymous to get true feedback
• Feedback can be provided in an open format and very quickly less than 2 mins

Adopting the above would help to establish true professional credibility. As a professional, you may be wondering how I can get it done?

getCREDIBLE platform that is focused on establishing professional credibility has implemented that and you can get started for free to see how it works. This platform also helps you build a digital version of your resume called Slate to present your professional credibility information in an interactive and timeline-based format.

Leveraging all Channels to Improve Visibility

Having discussed how to establish professional credibility, the next important step is to use it for professional growth both within the organization where you are currently employed and to use it to find your dream job with a new employer. The strategies may differ slightly, and they are explained below.

Professional credibility for career growth within an organization?

Most organizations have an annual appraisal cycle. A few of them have been talking about having shorter cycles of appraisal, however, it does not happen in a structured manner as they do not have systems in place for capturing continuous feedback. Typical appraisal cycles have the following challenges:

• Most of the decisions are being made by the reporting manager. Although the manager’s feedback is important there is too much weightage given to that
• Emotions and ego between the employee and manager play a major role instead of employee’s performance playing a major role
• While the appraisal cycle maybe for 12 months, higher weightage is given for the last 3 months due to loss of memory for the preceding 9 months

Using the getCREDIBLE platform to continuously engage with all members of your professional ecosystem and sharing your digital profile (Slate) with your manager for an appraisal conversation enables you to have objective and transparent conversations removing all the challenges faced in the current appraisal process to demand growth. Another big advantage you will have is the ability to identify a weakness early in the year and work on improving them in time before the appraisal conversation with your manager.

Professional credibility to find your dream job outside your organization

Traditional resumes or LinkedIn profiles are two common means to represent a professional’s skills as they move on their career development plan. Since in both these cases outside in view or continuous feedback from the professional ecosystem is missing, recruiters or hiring managers mainly rely on professional networks or references to find the suitable candidate. This approach severely limits the potential for a good candidate.

In the case of a professional with Slate, potential recruiters and managers can search for candidates with desired skills and rating levels with the confidence that these ratings are provided by the candidate’s professional ecosystem.

Once inside the slate they can view a timeline-based graph of the skills that are important for the job, making the new job come to the candidate and putting the good candidates in the driving seat in the job search process.

Being a truly digital format, Slate also makes it easier to share in different social media channels using short links and track the metrics around it like page view, duration, forwards, and others.

Wrapping up

There is increasing competition for any given professional job opportunity. Hence it is essential that you create a format that best suits your skill and industry to represent you the best..

You are in luck because you know where to look.

FAQs

1. How to make a professional resume?



Your professional resume begins with the approach. When you apply for a reverse chronological order, you prioritize recent achievements and qualifications over previous ones. That approach lets you be evaluated for who you currently are. Another thing to follow when you build the resume is to be concise with words and not cram in too much information. Stick with these pointers and your resume will have a professional outlook.

2. How to make a resume with no experience?

Having work experience isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for making a CV. When there is a tremendous number of fresh talents coming into the professional world, it is only fair where you can create a resume without the banner of work experience. How you do it is by detailing more on the educational qualifications matching with the job position you are aiming for. Furthermore, you add skills and awards you have adorned concerning the field.

3. How to make a resume on mobile?

While you will have websites like indeed and applications like Canva to create a resume, for the resume template to be precise, on-point and for it to have a professional outlook, you should try a resume builder named getCREDIBLE, which supports mobile applications, which lets your professional credibility speak for itself rather than your list of qualifications and experience.

4. How to make biodata?

Biodata, or biographical data, describes your personal information concerning work and life experiences as well as general attitudes, influences, and behavior. When an organization demands your biodata, you must be professional and short with its approach. You plan out a design that lets you express your information in the best manner, and then use certain pointers to make it more attractive and readable.

5. How to make a resume attractive?

Making a resume in itself, adhering to the rules of creating a resume, proper formatting is a problematic task. When you don’t make your resume attractive, the whole purpose of it becomes useless. So to make your resume stand out from the rest, stick to these pointers:-

• Concise information
• Skimmability
• Avoid objectives
• Reverse Chronological order