A great resume has always had an important job: It needs to communicate your value quickly enough to make someone want to keep reading. Today, that job is more complicated. Your resume may first pass through an applicant tracking system (ATS), be reviewed with the help of AI tools, and then land in the hands of a recruiter or hiring manager who is looking for evidence that you can solve the problems their organization needs to solve. That can make the process feel overwhelming, especially when resume best practices seem to be moving targets.
You can question everything you thought you knew about resumes, including:
- Do I need a different resume for every job?
- What’s pertinent to include?
- Should I load my resume with keywords?
- Is it okay to outsource the entire project to AI?
The fundamentals of a strong resume haven’t changed, but how you present them to ATSs and recruiters has shifted a bit in the last few years. The foundational story is the same: The best resume still tells a clear, compelling story about your experience, capabilities, and the value you can bring to an organization.
What you need to consider is how you can, should, and should not leverage technology to improve your resume without sacrificing quality, results, or—perhaps most importantly—the story your resume is telling.
Start with One Base Resume
You don’t need to start from scratch every time you find an interesting position. In fact, trying to maintain a completely different resume for every potential employer can quickly become an administrative nightmare. Instead, develop one strong, comprehensive resume that accurately represents your experience, skills, accomplishments, and qualifications. Think of it as your foundation. From there, update and adjust it to align with the specific positions you are pursuing.
If your base resume was built on solid resume best practices, your story will be there. You’re just shifting nuances as you apply to different roles, bringing forward the most relevant aspects.
If you’re applying for a project management position, for example, accomplishments demonstrating project leadership, cross-functional collaboration, process improvements, and successful implementations should be particularly prominent. If another opportunity emphasizes organizational change, you may want to give greater emphasis to the experiences that demonstrate your ability to lead people through change.
The goal is not to make yourself look like the perfect candidate for every job; it’s to make it easy for the right employer to recognize the value you already bring.
Remember: Your Resume Is a Marketing Tool
One of the most important resume best practices is also one of the easiest to overlook: Your resume is a marketing document, not a laundry list.
- A laundry list tells someone what you did.
- A marketing document helps them understand why what you did matters.
That means your resume should answer an employer’s fundamental question: How can this person help us? Start with the responsibilities you held, but don’t stop there. Show what you accomplished. Have you:
- Increased revenue?
- Reduced costs?
- Improved a process?
- Retained important clients?
- Implemented a new system?
- Solved a persistent problem?
- Led an organization through a significant change?
Those results provide evidence of your value, and your resume should make the connection between that experience and the needs of the organization as clear as possible. The reader shouldn’t have to dig through several pages to figure out why your background is relevant.
Build a Resume That Is Easy to Navigate
While every resume will be somewhat different, there are several core components that should make up a strong professional resume:
- Contact information should be current and easy to find. Include your name, phone number, email address, custom LinkedIn URL, and location as appropriate.
- Your title or headline should immediately communicate your professional identity and, when appropriate, the type of value you bring. This is more useful than simply putting “Resume” or “Professional Profile” at the top of the page. (And saying “Objective” is decades out of date.)
- A summary that shares how you fulfill the qualifications of the job description while incorporating relevant skills and keywords.
- Professional experience is where most of the substance belongs. For each position, include your job title, company, dates, and a brief description of the scope of the role. A short paragraph can provide context about the size, complexity, or purpose of the position.
- Then, use bulleted accomplishments to demonstrate what you actually achieved. These bullets should be results focused whenever possible rather than simply repeating your job description.
Beyond your experience, include other qualifications that support your candidacy. Depending on your background, that might include certifications, relevant training, professional memberships, publications, volunteer leadership, or other credentials.
The key is relevance. Your resume doesn’t need to include every credential you’ve ever earned simply because you earned it. Include information that helps support the professional story you’re telling.
Focus Your Experience on the Last 10–15 Years
A resume doesn’t need to provide a detailed history of your entire working life. For most professionals, the experience section should focus in depth on approximately the last 10–15 years. Earlier experience can be summarized when it provides useful context, but there’s generally no need to devote the same amount of space to a position you held 25 years ago as you do to one you held recently.
This is one of the principles behind an ageless resume. The objective is to focus attention on your current capabilities and relevant accomplishments rather than inviting unnecessary assumptions based on how long ago something occurred.
The same principle applies to education. In general, there’s no need to include graduation dates for education completed more than five years ago. Your degree, institution, certifications, and other relevant qualifications can stand on their own.
Naturally, there may be exceptions in certain circumstances, but for a standard professional resume, the focus should remain on what you can contribute today.
Update Your Skills for the Role
Whether you choose to include a dedicated skills section or incorporate skills strategically into the summary and experience areas, the goal is to keep them aligned with the position at hand. Most job descriptions provide you with clues about what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for, so you want to make sure your most relevant skills and qualifications appear prominently on your resume. This is where tailoring becomes particularly important.
If a position calls for change management, stakeholder engagement, strategic planning, or a particular technology, and you have meaningful experience in those areas, don’t make the employer hunt for it. Incorporate the relevant language naturally into your resume and connect it to your accomplishments.
That isn’t keyword stuffing. It’s making the connection between your experience and the employer’s needs easier to see.
Don’t Forget the ATS
Today’s resume also needs to be compatible with the technology used to organize and process applications. An ATS can help employers manage large volumes of applications, organize candidate information, and make relevant information easier for recruiters to find. That means your resume should be structured in a way that allows the system to read the information accurately.
Fortunately, good ATS practices generally complement resume best practices. Here’s the rundown to ensure your resume parses well into most ATSs:
- Keep important information out of headers and footers.
- Avoid graphs, charts, tables, and graphics that may not translate well through the system.
- Be cautious with multiple-column layouts, particularly when they make the reading order unclear.
- Use standard section headings, straightforward formatting, and readable fonts.
And remember that ATS compatibility is not a substitute for a compelling resume. Your goal is not to create a document for a machine. Your goal is to create a resume that can be accurately processed by technology and clearly understood by the person who ultimately evaluates your qualifications.
Use AI as a Guide, not a Substitute for Strategy
This is where the AI age offers an interesting opportunity. AI can help job seekers identify relevant skills, compare their experience with a position, surface language they may want to incorporate, and recognize areas where their resume could be more closely aligned with an opportunity. But there is a significant difference between using AI to improve your thinking and asking AI to write your career story for you.
AI doesn’t know the context behind every accomplishment. It doesn’t automatically understand which achievement you’re most proud of, why a particular project mattered, or which parts of your experience best demonstrate your leadership. And it certainly shouldn’t invent accomplishments, skills, or results that aren’t yours. That’s why technology works best when it’s paired with human guidance.
At Transition Solutions, our CareerDashboard™ incorporates AI to help guide the career-transition process, including helping individuals think strategically about their experience and how it aligns with potential opportunities. The technology provides another resource for the job seeker, while the human relationship provides the context, judgment, and personalization that technology alone cannot provide. That combination matters. A tool can identify a pattern. An experienced career consultant can help you decide what that pattern means for your career.
The Best Resume Is the One That Makes Your Value Clear
There are plenty of tools available today that promise to make resume writing easier. Some are useful. AI can certainly play a role. But technology hasn’t changed the fundamental purpose of a resume. A strong resume needs to make it easy for an employer to understand three things:
- What you have done.
- What you can do.
- How you can benefit their organization.
That requires strategy.
Start with one strong resume. Tailor it to the opportunities you pursue. Focus on relevant experience and accomplishments. Keep the format clean and ATS friendly. Update your skills and qualifications. And use AI thoughtfully—as a resource to help you evaluate and improve your resume, rather than as a replacement for your own judgment.
The technology may continue to change. The need for a clear, compelling story about your value won’t.
About Transition Solutions
At Transition Solutions, we have been helping companies and individuals navigate workforce changes for more than 35 years. Our experienced consultants combine personalized coaching, practical career strategies, and innovative technology to meet people where they are and help them move forward.
Our CareerDashboard™ provides individuals with tools and resources to support their career transition, while personalized guidance helps ensure those tools are being used strategically and effectively.
Learn more at transitionsolutions.com, call 888-424-0003, or email info@transitionsolutions.com. You can also connect with Transition Solutions on LinkedIn.