Maybe you are the type of person who looks at your resume at least once every few months to see how it can be improved or updated. Or maybe not. There are a lot of professionals in the world who haven’t even glanced at their resumes in years. If you already have the job of your dreams and don’t plan on changing careers, what’s the point?
No matter where you stand in your professional career, you should always be accessing your resume at least once or twice per year. You could almost call this time “spring cleaning”, just for your resume rather than your home. Here’s why you need to invest some time to spring clean your resume.
The objective statement should change over time
The objective statement within a resume is comprised of 2 to 3 sentences summarizing your career hopes and goals for the future. It can briefly describe what you have done so far within your career in order to reach those goals. Some people say that objective statements are no longer necessary, but they provide value and direction and start the page off right.
Just as your career goals change and develop over time, so should your resume objective. The objective will change as you gain more experience and expertise. It should be oriented around your current career goals, and since these are always evolving it makes sense that the objective should as well.
Your accomplishments for the year are still fresh in your mind
If you are forced to update your resume because of a job loss or career transition, this will be much more difficult if you haven’t taken a look at it in a while (or if you don’t even have one!).
You won’t have to do much work to perfect your resume if you’ve made it a habit to add your yearly accomplishments.
This can easily be done during your annual spring cleaning sessions. This will give you more time focus on interview questions for managers or put the perfect interview outfit together instead of trying to perfect your resume last minute.
Resume spring cleaning allows you to eliminate outdated info
Technically your resume should fit within the confines of a single 8” by 11” piece of paper. Chances are you could use more space than this and even have a 10-page resume if that was acceptable.
Unfortunately potential employees only want to see your skills and qualifications that fit within one page. When you engage in a resume spring cleaning each year this is the perfect time to cut out outdated or unnecessary information and replace it with more valuable content.
It gives you a chance to improve the overall design
When applying for a new job, there might be 100 candidates just like you. We aren’t saying that you lack uniqueness and aren’t special in any way, but your resume might not show that. In order to stand out from the crowd your resume needs to stand out from the other ones in the pile. One of the best ways to do this is to improve the overall design and layout from year to year.
