Fall is here, which means career fair season is in full-swing for the folks like me who work in the collegiate recruiting space. And if you’re not in or around college students, this is an important time of year for those looking for their next role since Fortune describes September as the best month to be job searching. This means that resumes are top-of-mind for many people right now.

Despite the time of year, because your resume may be the first or only impression a company or person may have of you, it’s crucial that you have your resume ready-to-go at any time. Your resume can be the one reason someone does or does not consider you further in an application process, and this means it has the weight of a “golden ticket,” if we want to go by Willy Wonka terms. 

I’ve seen hundreds of people write their resumes well, and I’ve seen closer to a thousand people craft their resumes very poorly. Because of that, I am passionate about helping people understand how important a great resume is and how that can be the gateway to your next professional opportunity. With that in mind, I wanted to provide some of my most pivotal resume tips and tricks for job seekers. Although I am no Willy Wonka in any sense, I would like to help you get one step closer to a “golden ticket” by following these four guidelines when building your resume.

Disclaimer: Resumes and resume advice can be very subjective. My experience in reviewing and building resumes span the academic, non-profit, and large for-profit companies in the agricultural, chemical, and pharmaceutical spaces, particularly with undergraduate talent. Trust your industry talent acquisition and recruiting experts if this advice doesn’t seem to apply to you or your industry of interest.

1. Tailor your resume to the position.

If your question is “How do I make my resume stand out?”…I will share this piece of advice immediately. You need to have a specific resume for each job you apply for so it can be uniquely catered to that position’s requirements and preferences. This means that you should be intentional about including keywords from the job description in your resume as much as possible. For example, if you’re applying for a sales job, you should have words like “sales,” “customer,” “relationship,” and “communication” interwoven throughout your experiences and skills listed on your resume, even if that wasn’t exactly / the only thing you did in that job. This will greatly increase your chances of moving forward in the process because it signals to the recruiter and hiring manager that you have relevant skills and experiences for the job, making their lives a bit easier when it comes to onboarding and training you.

In order to help yourself in job searching, I’d recommend that you have a long, running list of experiences on a “grand” or “full” resume which you can pick and choose pieces from for each application. This is the easiest thing to do, from my experience, so you update this one document throughout your jobs and cut/paste for each future application.

Since you should have lots of copies of your resume as you’re hunting for jobs (and not just one copy for everything 🙂), it might not feel important to you to save the document with your name in the file name…but it is. Managers can get hundreds of applicants for one position, so do them a favor and save it with your name instead of just “Resume”. 

2. Turn your experience into numbers. 

A great resume starts with self-reflection. You should reflect on your experiences (professional, volunteer, and extra-curricular) and consider what you learned and contributed, from each, not just what you did. Each “contribution statement” or bullet point under each experience should not only describe what you did, but it should show what value you brought to that role. This means that you should quantify and use numbers for your experiences as much as possible. For example, don’t write that you “hosted staff meetings,” but rather that you “hosted weekly meetings and trainings for 15 colleagues and 4 leaders.” Adding numbers provides the resume reviewer with more context about your role in the whole organization and shows what you contributed to the team. 

It’s normal for this to feel challenging, especially when we don’t feel we have numbers to articulate for everything we’ve done. My advice is for you to revisit your job description (if you have one), do some reflecting on what the bigger picture was within that team / how you helped contribute to that, and talk with someone from that team to help you brainstorm ideas. Resumes with numbers and quantifiable data on them automatically stand out WAY more than a list of responsibilities in each work section. 

3. Balance the length.

I spend about 10-20 seconds looking at someone’s resume before making a judgment on if they should move forward with my company or not. This is an incredibly short amount of time, so it is essential that you include the most pertinent information for that position and that you do so concisely. I appreciate seeing someone’s well-roundedness and diverse experiences, but I do not want to see an extra long list of extracurriculars that makes me question their level of involvement and commitment to what they did. Said differently, if you show me that you’re in 8 clubs, how much are you actually getting out of and contributing to those organizations? I’d rather you show me what value you brought to a smaller number of experiences than you showing me too many commitments at once (which would make me question your ability to make decisions, prioritize, and manage your time). 

At the same time, I do not want a resume where I see only one work experience listed and/or a ton of blank space remaining. Recruiters want to see that you have relevant experience and that it fills a page, proving you have the experience necessary to do the job effectively.

Simply put, within the first 3-5 years of your career (and in college), my recommendation is that resumes are only one page (front only). The largest exception to this is for graduate students – their research, publishing, and academic experiences are crucial in a CV / resume. No matter what, do your best to fill that page / document with experiences that show how easy it would be for you to step into this role and/or how quickly you’ll be able to learn what you don’t know in this job.

4. Keep the formatting simple.

Because recruiters want to know as much about you as possible on that sheet of paper so they can gauge your fit for the job and organization, it’s important to make it easy to read since there (hopefully) will be a lot of text on the page. This means that the formatting needs to be consistent throughout the whole page (i.e. same font, same sizes), the headers for each section need to be clear, and everything needs to follow the same general style. For example, I recommend putting all of the names of titles on the left along with the employer, and the dates for the experience on the right side of the page. This makes it very easy for recruiters to find the parts of information they are looking for. If your resume is not easy to follow and feels like a scavenger hunt at first glance because of the amount of time in which your resume is scanned, it’s likely to not move forward in the process.

(Extra pro-tip: avoid neon font. It might sound unique and catchy, but can come across as unprofessional and hard to read. I recommend black font and only your name in a darker color if you want to stand out.)

In addition, it’s important that you don’t add tables, pictures, graphics, or lines to your resume, especially if you’re applying to a company that uses an online system to collect applications (called an Applicant Tracking System, or “ATS”, which I’d recommend you read about here). If you’re not emailing your resume / application directly to a person, any sort of non-text character can throw the Applicant Tracking System off and reject you if it doesn’t recognize the formatting. There are some nuances to each ATS and there are lots of resources out there about how to get your resume through a system like this, so I recommend you do your research before submitting your final application and resume.

As you enter into or continue in the job search, remember that your resume is your ticket to the rest of each application process. Never underestimate the importance of having someone review it for you, using your resources as you finalize it, and editing it every so often (even if you’re not job searching). It can be disheartening to be looking for a new position, but if you do everything you can to ensure that your resume is top-notch, it can make the application process a bit easier.

I wish you all the best as you look for your next opportunity. Here’s to a resume that gets you through to the next, magical round of your job application process!