3) Optimize Your Resume: Establish a Connection

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Take your resume seriously

Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and many months of expert work to create a brochure that will perfectly represent the company at recruiting events. In contrast, the average student only spends a couple of hours piecing vague descriptions together for the resume without considering what effects it will have on his or her recruiting process. Your resume is a brochure about your educational and professional experiences. Your one page resume is extremely valuable real estate and everything you write on it must have a specific purpose. If a sentence does not create value in the recruiter’s mind, then you should take it out; if a word does not create value, then you should take it out.

“With a well optimized resume, you should be able to get interviews even with a less than competitive GPA.”

Just because a company says that its minimum GPA requirement is a 3.5, it does not mean that you can’t apply with a GPA of 3.2. The purpose of the “minimum requirement” is to weed out the unqualified, inexperienced, and unconfident applicants. If you have the desire, the experience, the networking abilities, and the resume, then you should be able to get an interview with a low GPA.

Few seconds to establish a connection

A very important fact to note is that most recruiters only spend about 10-25 second on each resume. Therefore, your resume must not only have good information, it must FEEL impressive. Within those precious few seconds, you need to already have made a connection with the recruiter. Take a look at the two resumes below. Which one feels more impressive?

The resume on the left feels impressive at first glance and encourages the recruiter to read through the resume. The one on the right looks bare and as if it is missing information. It just feels incomplete. You have to make the recruiter read your entire resume.

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