Shinebright's Top Tips When Writing a Resume
- Shannon Philip
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Your resume is more than a list of jobs you've held. It's your story, your professional narrative, and often your first chance to make an impression on a potential employer. Whether you're navigating a career transition or simply refreshing your materials, getting your resume right matters. At Shinebright, we've spent over 14 years helping professionals like you craft resumes that truly reflect who you are and what you bring to the table. Here are our top tips when writing a resume that opens doors.
Initial Tips For Writing A Resume: Core Principles That Matter
Before you dive into the details and our actual tips for writing a resume, remember that before you begin writing at all, you should take a step back and consider your approach. How you structure your resume can make all the difference in how hiring managers perceive your experience.
Choose the right structure for your story
You have options here. A ‘chronological’ resume lists your work experience in reverse order, starting with your most recent role. This works well if you have a steady career progression in a single field. But if you're writing a resume when changing careers, or if your greatest strengths don't fit neatly into a timeline, consider a ‘functional’ resume that puts your key skills and competencies front and center, or a ‘hybrid’ resume that blends both styles. Whichever approach you choose, it should help the reader see your value quickly and clearly.
Tailor your resume to each opportunity
This is one of the most important tips when writing a resume, and one that many professionals overlook. Sending the same generic resume to every job posting is a missed opportunity. Take the time to customize your resume for each role, and highlight the experiences and skills that align most closely with what that specific employer is looking for. This doesn't mean rewriting everything from scratch each time, but it does mean being intentional about what you emphasize.
Protect your professional integrity
Never lie or exaggerate on your resume. Your professional reputation is built on trust, and misrepresenting your experience can have serious consequences, not just for this job opportunity, but for your entire career. Be honest about your achievements, and let your genuine strengths shine through.
What to Cover in Your Resume
Knowing what to include in (and what to leave out of) a resume is an art form in itself. Let's break it down into ‘what's necessary’ and ‘what might be useful’ depending on your situation.
The Essentials
These elements should appear on every resume:
Contact Details: Include your name, address, phone number, and email address. Double-check that your email address is professional and that your voicemail is set up properly. Keep these up to date too, you don't want to miss that call because of outdated contact information.
Education: List your degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework. If you're early in your career, your education section might be more prominent. If you've been in the workforce for a while, it can move further down the page.
Work Experience: This is the heart of your resume. Include your job titles, company names, dates of employment, and key responsibilities and achievements for each role. Focus on what you accomplished, not just what you did. Don’t forget about things like part-time work, internships, volunteer work, even informal positions or roles you held while in school (such as writing for the paper, etc.) either. If you’ve done any of those, you can add them in here!
Awards and Achievements: Don't be shy about showcasing where you've excelled. Awards, recognitions, and quantifiable achievements demonstrate that you go above and beyond. They help hiring managers see not just competence, but excellence.
The "Nice to Haves"
Depending on the role you're pursuing, consider including:
Languages you speak: In our globalized world, multilingual abilities can be a significant advantage.
Skills and competencies that add value: Maybe you have technical skills, certifications, or qualities that aren't requirements for the role but would make you even more valuable. These can help you stand out.
Your objectives or aims: A brief statement about what you're looking for and what drives you can provide helpful context. It gives the reader insight into your bigger picture and helps them understand why you're here. This is especially important for those making a career transition, it can connect the dots that may not be evident by looking at their past experiences alone.
Formatting Your Resume
The visual presentation of your resume matters more than you might think. Formatting isn't just about aesthetics. It's about professionalism and readability.
Different industries have different expectations. Creative fields might welcome more visual flair, while traditional corporate environments often prefer conservative, clean layouts. Research the norms for your target industry and role, and follow them. Geography matters too. Different countries have different conventions for resumes, so if you're applying internationally, make sure you understand what's expected in that region.
Lastly, don’t forget to use a sensible, professional font in a readable size (typically 10-12 point), and stick to a simple color scheme. Black text on a white background is classic for a reason. The goal is to make your resume easy to read and navigate, not to showcase your graphic design skills (unless you're a graphic designer, or pursuing another, similarly-creative field).
Expressing Yourself: Tone and Language
How you write about your experience is just as important as what you write about. So…
Use active language
Instead of "was responsible for managing a team," try "managed a team of five to exceed quarterly targets by 20%." Active language is more engaging, more confident, and more effective at showcasing your contributions.
Be concise
Get your message across as quickly and succinctly as you can. Every word should earn its place on the page, because the more efficiently you communicate, the more you can say with the space available. Hiring managers often spend just seconds scanning a resume, so the more you can do this, the more you make those seconds count.
Stay objective and focused
Everything in your resume should provide relevant information about you and what you can do. This isn't the place for personal opinions, tangents, or anecdotes. Keep it professional and purposeful.
Should You Use AI to Write Your Resume?
With so many AI tools available, you might be tempted to let technology do the heavy lifting. Our take on the situation? Don’t do it.
We’ve covered the topic of AI resumes in detail already, but to give you a brief recap, AI can make a number of key errors that can result in a fatally flawed resume. For instance, it can miss critical nuance in job advertisements. It might therefore misunderstand what an employer is really looking for, causing you to emphasize the wrong experiences or skip over what actually matters.
More importantly, AI can misunderstand your skills and competencies, and misrepresent you in the process. Your career journey is unique, shaped by your natural strengths, your growth, your relationships, and your experiences. An algorithm can't capture that depth.
Also, the language AI generates often feels robotic and generic. Resumes created by AI tend to have a "cookie cutter" quality, with little of the intangible qualities that make you stand out shining through. When you're competing with other qualified candidates, those intangibles like your authentic voice, genuine passion, and unique perspective, can make all the difference.
Resume writing is an art form. It requires understanding both the technical requirements of your industry and the human elements that make you, you. That's not something you want to outsource to an algorithm, and the fact that we’ve made avoiding AI one of our tips for writing resumes should tell you how strongly we feel about that.
Writing an Effective Cover Letter
While we're focused on providing top tips when writing resumes today, we also mustn’t overlook the cover letter that should go with it. A well-crafted cover letter is a powerful thing, adding extra context to the factual information held within your resume.
A strong cover letter should:
Connect your experience directly to the specific role and company
Show that you've done your research and understand what they need
Highlight one or two key achievements that demonstrate your value
Express genuine enthusiasm for the opportunity
Give a glimpse of your personality and communication style
Your cover letter is your chance to make a personal connection before you ever step into an interview. When you're writing a resume when changing careers, a thoughtful cover letter can also help explain your transition and show how your transferable skills apply to this new direction.
Where Can You Get Help Writing a Resume?
Right here! Shinebright offers expert resume writing services, and our experienced team knows just how to craft a resume that truly reflects your strengths and which can make a meaningful contribution to your professional success.
As you might expect, our resume writing experts are aware of all the tips for writing resumes that we’ve talked about above, but that’s not all. In the modern landscape, there are also things like changing formatting requirements, application software requirements and more to bear in mind. Our team stays up to date with developments in all of these areas, and then adds in years of our own resume writing experience too. It all adds up to a service that can take an average or sub-par resume and transform it into something spectacular!
So, when you partner with Shinebright, you're not just getting a document. You're getting expert care for your story. You're getting a resume that positions you for roles where you can feel fulfilled, effective, and happy in your work.
Other Ways Shinebright Can Support Your Professional Journey
Resume writing is just one way we help professionals like you find more fulfillment and success in your careers. Let’s explore a couple of others now.
One-to-One Career Coaching
If you're feeling stuck or dissatisfied in your current role, or if you're not sure what your next step should be, our one-to-one coaching (conducted remotely via Zoom) offers personalized guidance, accountability, and support to help you find the clarity you’re looking for. We use the CliftonStrengths framework to help you recognize and grow your natural talents, develop greater self-awareness, and become your own best advocate as you navigate career transitions or professional development.
Group Coaching
Growing can feel easier and more energizing when you’re doing it alongside others. Our group coaching programs combine structure, community, and expert guidance to help you make meaningful progress toward your career goals..
A Few Closing Thoughts
We certainly hope that the tips for writing a resume that we’ve covered today are helpful to you, but remember, whether you need help crafting a compelling resume, navigating a career change, or preparing yourself for more senior roles, Shinebright is here to guide you.
Ready to get started? Then don’t wait, take the leap! Schedule a consultation and discover how we can help you shine brighter in your career.
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