How can I write a great resume?
Edit your resume for the role.
A company posting a job is looking to solve a problem, so highlight and edit your experience to show how you can help with that specific problem. Cut down the descriptions of your less relevant roles. Make it clear where and when you’ve gained the specific experience and skills they need while giving an overview of your wider career history.
You’re only going to get a limited amount of time and attention when hiring managers review all the applications they’ve received and it’s much better to give them a detailed look at your most recent/relevant roles than it is to present them with in-depth breakdowns of everything you’ve ever done.
Keep the format clean, consistent and easy to read.
Over-designing your resume won’t do you any favours; it may seem like putting your experience into grids and expressing your skills as graphs would make your CV stand out but generally hiring managers are looking to quickly see the most relevant information expressed in the most straightforward way.
Decide on how you’re going to structure your career history (for example: Dates, Company Name, Job Title, 3 Bullet Points on what you achieved in the role) and keep that structure throughout. Always set out your experience reverse chronologically – i.e. With your current position first and your oldest position last.
Speaking of consistency: Make sure your resume matches up with your job history on LinkedIn. HR and hiring managers are very likely to pull up your LinkedIn profile to check how reliable/accurate your CV is.
It helps to get very specific about your past impact on the businesses you’ve worked for.
Saying you’ve designed multiple Compliance procedures and policies is good – having concrete numbers that show your work reduced Compliance incidents is even better. Quantify your achievements whenever possible – a bullet-pointed example with a number or statistic is often more effective than a block paragraph.
Keep it concise.
Some people will tell you that a good resume must be no more than two pages but if you work in a complex technical field like Governance, Risk and Compliance, that can be an impossible target. It is however definitely a smart move to keep it as brief as possible with only the most relevant information. If you’ve worked in two or more roles within your chosen field, you don’t need to still be telling potential employers that you were a prefect at school.
Similarly, with qualifications, keep it to ones that are relevant to the role. If you make every line count, you can keep the hiring manager reading even if you can’t contain your full job history within two pages.
In Conclusion
The first impression you make as a candidate is when your potential employer sees your resume. While we like to hope that the person with the best experience and most relevant skills will be the one to get the job, you can give yourself a better shot by fine-tuning your CV to make sure your application survives those crucial first six seconds.
As specialist Financial Services recruiters, Kind Consultancy can make sure your resume is fine tuned for the role and organisations that you’re applying to. Contact us today to discuss how we can help advance your Governance, Risk, Compliance or Financial Crime career.
