• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • English
    +1 (866) 424-3996

    info@AccurServices.com

    Candidate Login
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • YouTube

    ACCUR Recruiting Services

    Executive Search: Luxury Goods, Travel Retail & Export

    • Services
      • Executive Search
      • Professional Search
      • Contingency Search
      • RPO
    • Industries
      • Beauty & Cosmetics
      • Cannabis
      • Consumer Goods
      • eCommerce & Digital
      • Fashion
      • Food & Beverage
      • Hospitality, Tourism & Leisure
      • Luxury Goods
      • Private Equity / Startups
      • Real Estate
      • Sporting Goods
      • Tobacco
      • Travel Retail
      • Watches & Jewelry
      • Wines & Spirits
      • Other Industries >
    • Offices
      • New York City
      • New Jersey
      • Miami, FL
      • Los Angeles, CA
      • Bogotá, COLOMBIA
      • Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
      • ——
      • PARTNER OFFICES >>
        • North America >
          • Austin, TX, USA
          • Boston, MA, USA
          • Chicago, IL, USA
          • Denver, CO, USA
          • Houston, TX, USA
          • Las Vegas, NV, USA
          • Los Angeles, CA, USA
          • Miami, FL, USA
          • New Jersey, USA
          • New York, NY, USA
          • San Diego, CA, USA
          • San Francisco, CA, USA
          • Washington, DC, USA
          • Montreal, QC, CANADA
          • Toronto, ON, CANADA
          • Vancouver, BC, CANADA
          • more…
        • Latin America >
          • Bogotá, COLOMBIA
          • Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
          • Mexico City, DF, MEXICO
          • PANAMA
          • São Paulo, BRAZIL
          • more…
        • Europe >
          • Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
          • Barcelona, SPAIN
          • Berlin, GERMANY
          • Brussels, BELGIUM
          • Dublin, IRELAND
          • Geneva, SWITZERLAND
          • London, UK
          • Madrid, SPAIN
          • Milan, ITALY
          • Moscow, RUSSIA
          • Munich, GERMANY
          • Paris, FRANCE
          • Prague, CZECH REP.
          • Rome, ITALY
          • Vienna, AUSTRIA
          • Warsaw, POLAND
          • more…
        • Asia-Pacific >
          • Hong Kong, CHINA
          • Melbourne, VIC, AUSTRALIA
          • Seoul, KOREA
          • Shanghai, CHINA
          • SINGAPORE
          • Sydney, NSW, AUSTRALIA
          • Tokyo, JAPAN
          • more…
        • Middle East & Africa >
          • Doha, QATAR
          • Dubai, UAE
          • Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA
          • more…
    • Consultants
    • For Candidates
      • Jobs
      • Register / Submit Resume
      • Login
      • Email Job Alert
      • Contact
      • Resources >
        • Videos
        • Tips for Job Seekers
        • Polls
        • Excel Test
    • Jobs
      • Search Jobs
      • By Seniority >
        • Executive Level Jobs
        • Middle Management Jobs
        • Entry Level jobs
      • By Industry >
        • Beauty Jobs
        • Cannabis Jobs
        • CPG Jobs
        • Fashion Jobs
        • Food & Beverage Jobs
        • Luxury Goods Jobs
        • Private Equity / Startups
        • Retail Jobs
        • Tobacco Jobs
        • Travel Retail Jobs
        • Watch & Jewelry Jobs
        • Wine & Spirits Jobs
      • By Location >
        • NYC Area Jobs
        • Miami Area Jobs
        • Ft Lauderdale / WPB jobs
        • California Jobs
        • Texas Jobs
        • CANADA Jobs
        • ASIA-PACIFIC Jobs
        • CARIBBEAN Jobs
        • EUROPE Jobs
        • LATIN AMERICA Jobs
        • MIDDLE EAST AFRICA Jobs
      • By Function >
        • C-Level / GM Jobs
        • International Sales Jobs
        • National Sales Jobs
        • Local Sales Jobs
        • Retail Sales Jobs
        • Retail Operations Jobs
        • Marketing Jobs
        • Product Development Jobs
        • Digital Jobs
        • eCommerce Jobs
        • Finance & Strategy Jobs
        • Accounting Jobs
        • Buying & Purchasing Jobs
        • Supply Chain Jobs
        • Design / Creative Jobs
        • Training Jobs
        • HR Jobs
        • Administrative Jobs
      • By Type >
        • Home Based Jobs
        • Entrepreneurial Jobs
    • About
      • Our Approach
      • Testimonials
      • Meet Our Team
      • Join ACCUR’s Team
      • Our Global Network >
        • NPA Worldwide
        • Become A Partner
      • Resources >
        • Tips for Recruiters
        • Tips for Job Seekers
        • Polls
        • Videos
        • Free Online Excel Test
    • News
    • Contact
    Contact

    How to write a great resume for a job

    You are here: Home / Tips for Job Seekers / Resume Writing Tips / How to write a great resume for a job

    July 2, 2018 by Edouard Thoumyre, CEO ACCUR Recruiting Services 2 Comments

    10 tips for writing a good resume!

    Resume writing tips and articles always leave out the most important. It takes only 5 seconds for your resume and your job application to be rejected! And you have only 1 chance to make a good first impression. Therefore, it is key that you know what makes your resume stand out right away. And it is not the layout…

    Also we usually advise against using professional Resume Writing Services as they rarely are the ones selecting the resumes in the end. And if you are looking for a corporate job, you should be able to write it yourself!

    We have created a video summarizing all our professional resume writing tips:
    Also, at the bottom of this post, there is a link to download our Professional Resume Template.

    Now let’s get started on how to write a good resume!

    Layout

    It is our strong professional opinion that resumes should look standard and plain. Even if you are a Graphic Designer, in which case you can be creative with your portfolio. Trying to add many colors and graphic design elements is a common resume mistake. It comes out as a distraction for the hiring managers, who usually know what they are looking for and where to find it.

    Structure

    While having a good structure is not sufficient, it is however necessary to show how professional you are and to highlight all the important details of your profile.

    • Contact details
    • Objective
    • Work experience
    • Education
    • Computer and Language skills

    We have intentionally left out the “professional summary” section as we believe it has more “cons” than “pros”.

    Contact details

    Have a professional email address. Not teenage-looking… And ideally not @aol.com as everyone is wondering how it is still working….
    Get a local phone number, if you are abroad but plan on relocating if you land a job…
    Just below your contact details is the perfect place to display that you are legally authorized to work in the country. If your entire experience is abroad, potential employers will legitimately be concerned about your eligibility to work here. And if you have a valid work authorization, you absolutely should show it!

    Objective

    Skip the professional summary. It is usually a hard-to-read summary of your resume. And your resume is already a summary of your career. To get a quick understanding of your profile, we usually scroll very quickly through your resume to catch employer names, job titles, industries, dates and location. This is much quicker and provides so much more details.

    Save some space for what really counts!

    Instead of a summary, explain what job you are looking for in a short Objective section. Explain your career goals, your transferable skills if you want to change industry, and the job you are currently looking for.

    Work Experience or Professional experience

    The really big piece!

    Employer names

    Most important: Are your employer names and job titles very clearly highlighted?
    Same thing for your dates of employment and why not job locations?
    It should take us literally 5 seconds to get all this. If not, this is the biggest mistake you can make when writing your resume!

    Your employer names, regardless of how well known they are, should have a brief 1 or 2 lines description. This company description should give us the industry, the product or services, some idea about the size and anything else relevant. It is absolutely necessary if the company is not very well known, and a good professional best practice to show off how concise and clear you can be introducing a large corporation.

    Job titles

    We think in many cases, job titles could also benefit from a quick intro on 1 or 2 lines providing some key facts, such as what is the size of your business, what is your territory, how many people you manage, who you are reporting to, who are your clients etc… A quick series of key facts like that goes a long way for us to interpret and dimension your role!

    Job description

    • Organize your content in bullet points. It is much easier to read and scroll through, than a full text paragraph.
    • Don’t list 20 bullet points! It’s too much.
    • Prioritize your ideas. Don’t start with your administrative duties if you are in sales. Start with Sales and anything showing you are very sales driven!!
    • If you still have too many bullets point, you could split them in 2 sections: JOB DESCRIPTION and ACHIEVEMENTS. It is not very frequent, but we like very much because it helps showing off how structured you are and it helps our reading.

    Education

    Put your education section before your work experience, only if you are very junior, or, why not, if you have a big Ivy league name to show off. But even if you have Harvard and 5 years of experience, in our opinion, those years of experience should count more.

    We usually do not pay too much attention to that section. We just want to see it exists and make sure there is at least a Bachelor degree (because we mostly recruit for corporate jobs).

    Overall don’t take too much space here unless, again, you are very junior, in which case you can add some of your most important classes or anything else you want to highlight.

    Types of Skills

    How to write skills in a resume?
    Depending on your field, you may want to split languages and computer skills. But for most non-technical jobs, there are ok together. Overall it doesn’t matter too much as long as they show up at the end of your resume, where there are expected to be. For most job seekers, there are no other skills to write on a resume.

    Computer skills is a classic where for most people we expect to see at least Excel, but everyone is just writing the exact same thing. They are proficient… Whatever that means. So if you are good and want to stand out, one very efficient tip we see sometimes, is people adding the advanced functions and features they know, like Vlookup, pivot table or macros. So NOW THAT tells us something! And you DO stand out.

    We are now done with the actual content of the resume and this is where it gets very interesting: the most unknown insider tips.

    Resume “SEO” and ATS optimization

    One thing that executive resume writing services have always wrong is their lack of understanding of how an ATS work. Most well organized companies use an ATS. ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System and those ATSs are basically databases of candidates, that have the ability to receive and manage your applications. But they are not just storing your resume, they are reading your resume, interpreting it and creating or updating your candidate profile. They are actually able to recognize what is your name, your email, who were your employers, your date of employments etc… and filling up automatically your candidate profile with a certain degree of accuracy. It is called parsing, resume parsing!

    Then decision makers, use the ATS search engine to locate relevant candidates. If the parsing of your resume hasn’t been done properly, your resume might not be found and whereas a classic well-structured resume should get a parsing accuracy of 90 to 100%, a poorly structured resume or a resume using an improper structure can go down to 0% accuracy. Just invisible…

    How can you maximize the parsing accuracy of your resume?

    File format.

    Word documents tend to perform much better. PDFs however, even though they look modern and professional, tend to confuse resume parsers.

    As much as we like PDFs, but it is a safer bet to stick to Word.

    The one thing you should avoid at all cost is an image PDF. There are 2 types of PDFs, text-PDFs and image-PDFs. If you save your word, document as a PDF it going to be a text PDF, “readable” by a resume parser. If you create your resume on photoshop because you want it to look different and fancy (DON’T), or if you scan your old damaged paper copy and save them as PDF (DON’T EITHER), they will be image-PDFs, that a parser won’t be able to read at all.

    Header and Footer

    Contact details in header and footer are also a risk that the parser will not pick that up.
    Reduce a little the size of the header and footer if you want, but it is better avoid putting anything else that a page number there.

    Table

    You might have seen resume templates based on a word table of few rows and columns, so that it guarantees proper alignment of your content before you remove those lines. It might work well for a clean structured layout, but resume parsers hate that. You should avoid tables.

    Keyword SEO

    Finally, you should consider keyword SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Like for websites wanting to be found on google for certain keywords, if you want your resume to be found for certain keywords too, you need to include them…

    How many times have we seen consumer goods professionals not mentioning “consumer goods” once in their resume…?

    There are not that many types of keywords we can use to search for candidates in our ATS or linkedin or any resume database: company names, industry descriptions, job titles, maybe territories or languages. You need to make sure your keywords show up somewhere. Employer names will show up, but if you worked in small unknown companies, it doesn’t help. You should consider adding your client names then. This is another very important reason to introduce your employer or job title by a line or 2 of key facts (usually full of important keywords).
    If you want to change industry, using the Objective section to add those new keywords, is an efficient tactic.

    Professional best practices

    File name

    Whether it is for your resume or any other documents, the file name should make sense by itself. It looks good and professional, but it also makes it easier for decision makers to find it in their hard drive if they don’t have an ATS.

    So includes the words: Resume, your name, ideally the date or the year, so that we can see how current it is. You can also add the title of the job you are looking for. And why not ENG for English, or SP for Spanish or FR for French…

    Mailing

    Don’t paper mail your resume, or at least don’t only mail it. It is 2018, paper goes to the trash and it hurts the planet. Our office is 100% paperless for example. Of course, we will take a brief look at it, but with the wrong first impression in mind. If you still want to do it, you should absolutely follow the rest of the modern processes of applying online or emailing your resume.

    But how to use your great new resume is all other new topic for a future video!

     

    We hope you learnt something in this guide and here is a link to download a resume template we have created that includes all our resume writing tips. You can use it as a framework and modify it at your convenience, as long as you remain plain and simple!

    Resume Template download link pic

    Category iconResume Writing Tips,  Tips for Job Seekers,  Videos

    Reader Interactions

    Trackbacks

    1. List of skills needed in luxury business | ACCUR Recruiting says:
      July 2, 2018 at 12:23 pm

      […] is controlled by three major groups, Kering, LVMH, and Richemont, an ambitious individual seeking a resume refresh must never leave her group because, as a matter of fact, most of the brands that she’d […]

      Log in to Reply
    2. interview Q&A in luxury retail | ACCUR Recruiting says:
      July 2, 2018 at 12:25 pm

      […] of questions to determine the true character of your interviewee besides what is written on their resume. In this guide, we look at the luxury retail interview questions and the answers you can expect […]

      Log in to Reply

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

    Primary Sidebar

    Subscribe to our Newsletter

    Recent News

    Jean Paul Agon Portrait

    ACCUR on L’Oréal’s CEO Search in Women’s Wear Daily

    ACCUR in Patch: The South Florida Job Market

    ACCUR’s Year In Review: The COVID-inspired Trends to Watch

    Goldman Sachs Eyes South Florida For New Office, is Your Business Next?

    Legal Cannabis in New Jersey: The New Opportunities

    Understanding Amazon’s Role in the Post-Pandemic E-Commerce Landscape

    Advice From LinkedIn on Thriving in a Remote Sales Environment

    Insight Report: Candidates Weigh in On Work Post-COVID

    Poll Results Picture

    Poll on Remote Work

    Improving Online Meetings and Interviews

    Jobs Report for October 2020

    A better approach to executive search.

    +1 (866) 424-3996

    info@AccurServices.com

    Offices & Addresses

    Footer

    ACCUR Recruiting Services

    Boutique Search Firm with proven experience and processes across multiple consumer goods categories and supported by a Global Network of recruitment partners in all sectors and all continents.

    +1 (866) 424-3996

    info@AccurServices.com

    Newsletter Subscription

    Industries of Expertise

    • Beauty & Cosmetics
    • Cannabis
    • Consumer Goods
    • eCommerce & Digital
    • Fashion
    • Food & Beverage
    • Hospitality, Tourism & Leisure
    • Luxury Goods
    • Private Equity / Startups
    • Tobacco
    • Travel Retail
    • Watch & Jewelry
    • Wines & Spirits
    • Other industries…

    Additional Expertise

    • Wine & Spirits Recruiters in NYC
    • Travel Retail Recruiters in Miami

    ACCUR Offices

    • New York, NY, USA
    • Montclair, NJ, USA
    • Miami, FL, USA
    • Los Angeles, CA, USA
    • Bogotá, COLOMBIA
    • Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA

    Partner Offices

    Explore all our partner office locations around the globe.

    Copyright © 2006 – 2020 ACCUR Recruiting Services. All rights reserved.

    Terms & Conditions – Privacy Policy – Return to top

    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • YouTube