It’s easy to dust off your old resume and update it with your most recent role and new skills. The problem is, when you’re a senior professional or you have lots of experience behind you, it’s not enough to simply tag these on the end of your work experience.
If you don’t go through and remove old information and refresh your content, you’ll end up with an outdated and irrelevant resume that’s five pages long.
This isn’t going to help you land your next position.
But how do you know what to keep, and what is the best way to declutter your resume?
Here are four strategies to get you started.
1. Refresh your resume summary
Your resume will begin with your summary, and this needs to be a short and succinct description of who you are and what you do.
Over the years, resume summaries have got shorter, and nowadays, it is widely understood that between three to six sentences are enough. Any more than that, and you might put the recruiter off.
Now, this can be challenging when you’ve got an impressive career behind you, but remember, this is just a quick introduction to some of your highlights.
So not only does this section need to be updated, but everything included must be relevant to the role. Everything else can go!
With this in mind, you should include your most recent position, and any impressive skills, achievements, or qualifications you have, depending on what is outlined as most desirable in the job description.
Forget about creating lofty resume objectives or huge paragraphs trying to span your impressive 20-year career.
This top quarter of your resume needs to grab the recruiter’s attention instantly, so they don’t want to hear about your first job after college all those years ago. It needs to be up-to-date, engaging, and, most of all, relevant.
So go through and cut the fluff and proofread this section several times to make sure it’s perfect.
2. Be selective about your key skills
You are an experienced professional with a list of skills the size of your arm, but this doesn’t mean you need to try and cram them all into your core skills section.
Instead, it is better to include up to 10 core skills in this section, and you can mention others later in your employment history.
The best way to ensure you get this right and avoid unnecessary or unhelpful clutter is to choose the top skills for your industry, role, or those outlined in the job description.
It’s also time to dump those outdated tools and implicit skills. In particular, remove outdated technology that most senior professionals are expected to know anyway. An example of this could be email or Word.
The same applies to soft skills. While it’s a good idea to include some, try to avoid adding broad skills like ‘communication’ and give more specific details about how you put this to use instead.
It's important to refresh your resume content, or you’ll end up with an outdated and irrelevant ... [+]
3. Don’t live (too far) in the past
Your work experience section must give an overview of your career and the jobs you’ve had in the past. But this doesn’t mean you need to give 25 years’ worth of details. One of the best and simplest ways to declutter your resume is to remove any outdated positions.
In most cases, you shouldn’t need to go back more than ten years, but if you’ve done a lot of job hopping in that time, try to avoid listing more than three to four examples of past employment.
Essentially, you want to list the most recent jobs in chronological order and remove the rest. The only exception to this is if you’re switching industries and you have a past position that feels much more relevant to this role, and you think it could give you a competitive edge.
Plus, resumes have changed a bit since you were last on the job hunt, and today’s recruiters want to see more than just a list of your daily tasks. So this is also your opportunity to go through and remove any long, boring lists of responsibilities and to spice up this section with some key achievements and statistics instead.
4. Consolidate your education
Finally, when you’re first starting out in your career and don’t have much experience, giving more details about your educational career makes sense.
However, once you’re a seasoned professional, it’s highly unlikely that the exams you took 30 years ago at high school will have any bearing on whether you get the job or not.
This gives you a perfect chance to go through and consolidate your education section to make it much shorter. Cut out the outdated information and free up more space for those important sections like your employment history.
At this stage, you don’t need to go into much detail about your courses, honors, and extracurricular activities. It’s enough to simply list what you studied and the grades you achieved.
Combine this with the three other strategies we’ve outlined above, and you can create a succinct and engaging professional resume that is more likely to secure you an interview.
