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4 Tips That Will Make Your Job Application Stand Out

It’s hard enough to get the job of your dreams, but doing so in the middle of a worldwide financial crisis is an even bigger challenge for anyone. Fresh graduates from even the most reputable universities around the globe are unprepared to compete against experienced employees who have been laid off from their previous jobs.

If you’re in this kind of situation, you can simply give up your hands and try to find a lesser job that’s easier to snag. Or you can try to make your resume look as good as possible, whether or not you’ve had prior job experience.

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Companies don’t have all the time in the world to scrutinize your resume to see if you’re a good fit for their vacant position. Every hopeful applicant usually has under fifteen minutes to get the attention of his potential employer through a well-crafted resume. But if your boss-to-be is going through a stack of twenty or more applications, he can easily get bored from trying to wade through all the information.

Try these four innovative resume tips on your next job hunt:

Play with the text appearance.

Most job applications feature the same uniform-size font all throughout the document. However, this makes your job application look like all the rest and bores the reader to death. Spruce up your resume by using different font sizes and styles to distinguish different sections from each other.

Type your name in capital letters, bold, 18-point Times New Roman at the very top of the page, and then your contact information in normal 14-point font. For each new section heading, use 14-point, underlined font. This way, your reader can easily make out the things that you want to say and zoom in on the data most relevant to the position you’re applying for.

Replace bulleted lists with columnar data.

Using bulleted or numbered listings of your employment history and most important achievements is the convention for most job applications. To stand out, you can try using a column listing instead. This allows you to break the document into even smaller, more manageable sections that do away with monotony. You also lessen the number of pages of your resume by taking out too many white spaces.

Put together all your relevant skills and certifications together in a column or box so that they are more visually appealing. A long list can have the effect of making the reader’s eyes glaze over. But if your text is within tables or columns, the reader is forced to actually go through what you have written.

Offer to provide your potential employer with a portfolio of prior relevant work output.

Anyone can submit a standard job application, so why should your boss be impressed by a self-serving piece of paper that basically touts all your desirable skills and accomplishments? A portfolio is a more authoritative source of information about your abilities and achievements.

This is what your boss can rely on should he want to verify if the marketing brochures you said you produced for a prior employer is actually your handiwork. Always bring the portfolio with you on your job interviews so you can immediately provide a copy if one is asked of you.

That said, you have to be perfectly honest about what you can and cannot do on your current set of skills and knowledge. Don’t say that this or that document is part of your portfolio if you didn’t personally participate in its creation.

Create a video resume and submit a copy with your written application.

Not a lot of people utilize the incredible power of audio-video presentations in trying to land a plum job. However, this is actually an effective way to convince your potential employer that you’re the best pick of the pack. By demonstrating your skills at AVP production, you’re already telling your boss-to-be that this is one thing you can do well.

A video resume will also give you an opportunity to show off your other job-related skills, such as delivering a mock sales pitch to a client or customer relationship management. This is something that your employer can’t test just by asking you questions and giving you written exams.

At the end of the day, your application is just one of the many factors that your interviewer will account for in deciding whether you’re the right fit for the job. Your actual performance in the interview and exams will also weigh in on his decision whether to call you back for further screening or put you on the waiting list.

 

Guest Post Author: When not out building relationships with other bloggers, Krisca Te can be found reading blogs that tackle personal development. She is also a personal finance freak who is currently working with ACC, a personal finance blog that writes about financial literacy.

 

2 thoughts on “4 Tips That Will Make Your Job Application Stand Out”

  1. How about the new style resumes that many people are using these days? I’ve been considering making one just to test the waters a bit.

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