You should be aware that in a particular job opening, you may be competing with hundreds to thousands of other candidates. Many of your competitors can even hold higher credentials and qualifications than you do. The good news is that you may outpace and outshine those candidates if you could produce an impressive resume. The bad news is that you may not be able to come out with a really noticeable and outstanding one.

A human resources personnel who is making the first cut for the short list of applicants surely is dreaded that he needs to browse through thousands of resumes in a day to select rightful and qualified applicants. Thus, every strategy you could take or every good layout you could use should be employed to make sure your resume makes that good first impression. You surely do not aim to be screened out. Here are some guidelines to make your resume survive the bloody screening process.

Keep the resume as short as possible. If you could squeeze in all relevant information in just a page, do so. Prospective employers do not have enough time to browse through everything written in the document. If they need to find out more about you, they could ask during the interview.

Make the document easy to read. Ease to the eyes not only involves good layout but also overall organization. Thus, your resume should have clear headings, bulleted points and brief statements of professional achievements.

Avoid jargons even if you are professionally in line with the industry of the company. Your resume may be read by someone from the HR department who is not very well familiar with industry terms.

Do not overdo design and layout. Surely, you want to express your creativity. The resume is not the right opportunity to showcase your layout abilities, unless you are applying to be a layout artist. Use New Times Roman as a standard font if you prefer fonts with serif and Arial, Verdana or Helvetica for sans serif fonts. Use beige or white paper for printing.

Justify and support your job achievements and accomplishments with numerical data. For instance, you should mention you have helped boost your previous company’s annual sales by 75%. Numbers could be great attention catchers in resumes, but do not fill the document with too much of it. It may not be advisable to mention your current and expected salary range, unless required.

Skip other personal information like religion, age, hobbies, talents or civil status. They could just fill space and make the resume look jammed and overloaded with data. Remember that good resumes are those with much white space, which give ease to the eyes of readers.

Proofread before sending. Typographical and grammatical errors as well as misspellings will not create a good impression of you. Have other people read and critique your resume so you can be sure it is free of possible mistakes. Always improve and update the document.