Money Matters

Resume guide: 3 tips to make your CV standout

Paddy Hirsch Mar 6, 2013
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If you are hitting the job market, the one thing you'll need is a good resume. But how do you get yours to the top of the heap? Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Money Matters

Resume guide: 3 tips to make your CV standout

Paddy Hirsch Mar 6, 2013
If you are hitting the job market, the one thing you'll need is a good resume. But how do you get yours to the top of the heap? Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
HTML EMBED:
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On Friday, the Labor Department will report its latest monthly jobs report, which will reveal how many jobs were added in February and whether the unemployment rate budged from 7.9 percent.

If you are hitting the job market, the one thing you’ll need is a good resume. But how do you get yours to the top of the heap?

Paddy Hirsch, senior producer of personal finance at Marketplace, has these tips:

1. Create two resumes, a search-engine-optimized (SEO) version and a regular version. If you are applying through a search engine, such as Monster or Jobscore, a computer completes a first pass of all applicant resumes before a human ever reads them.

2. Make your SEO resume plain and include keywords. Use bold type sparingly. Format everything to the left side of the page. And make sure everything is spelled correctly. Search algorithms tally up the number of keywords in order to evaluate resumes. The easier you can make it for the computer to find keywords, the better.

3. Old resume rules still apply. After you’ve gotten past the computer review, your resume will be read by a human. Make sure it is clearly written, typo-free, and emphasizes relevant work experience.

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