A resume, a good resume, is designed to highlight your experience. Most importantly, it should cover your achievements and the accomplishments from your experience. That is what catches the eye of recruiters the most, because if it’s relevant, they’ll want you to do that for their company too.

Your resume will also cover your key competencies, your education, and any technical proficiency you have. If you feel like it’s relevant to the role, you can also include additional information such as awards you have won, training certifications, and even other languages you know. However, your resume should not extend past two pages as a document in many cases. Recruiters these days skim-read more than anything and will mark your CV against a checklist of what they need, and what they desire. Your resume needs to be short and sweet, unless you have had extensive experience across a variety of industries and companies.

If this is the case: you need to summarise effectively. You need to highlight your most recent career experience, ranging between five to ten years, and summarise the rest based on your key skills, responsibilities, and achievements. If you’re fresh out of university and struggling to get your resume acknowledged or feel disheartened by the experience requirements for job listings – remember: you have three to five years of experience. Your degree counts. It has enabled you to develop the skills and technical experience necessary to enter the workforce.

Your resume is a snapshot of you. An advertisement. It strips away everything else and shows what you can do for a business in terms of your skills and your qualifications. It is designed to get you an interview, where you truly get to shine and impress with your personality and your eagerness for the opportunity.

You would be hard pressed to get a job in today’s market without a resume.