This post is for you if you’re an artist or arts professional who’s freaked AF about the pandemic, the industry and whether or not you’ll ever work again, in this field or any other one. As an actor who’s also a resume expert and former recruiter, I want to give you some simple fixes to get your resume noticed right now.

At this point I’ve done plenty of hiring, on top of reviewing, evaluating and creating thousands of resumes, so you can bet I’ve been in the unfortunate position where I have not wanted to call a qualified person for an interview. Why? Because I’ve simply hated their resume. And who wants that? I know you don’t.

Somehow, qualified people are cobbling together resumes that look like a baking project gone bad. It’s a real shit show.

Recruiters look at your resume for 20 seconds before they decide if they’re going to keep reading. Clarity in your resume is essential. We get confused if it’s not there. And what do confused people do? They move on to the next thing where hopefully they won’t be confused. Right now, employers are receiving hundreds of resumes for one job, so you want YOUR resume to be noticed. It’s as simple as that. And I can help. I’m gonna give you three simple fixes that will help you and get your resume noticed. These tips will work now during the pandemic and also when it’s all over. Applying these fixes will take your resume from atrocious/confusing to readable/ much clearer. Because, truly, your being a creative and working in the arts is great and makes you versatile. But it does not give you license to just slap together a resume any which way and expect people to try to decipher it.

When it comes down to it, book smarts and professional accomplishments don’t hold a candle to a well-designed, proofread resume that is easy to read.

Here are the simple fixes:

1. Typos – for the love of all that’s holy, use whatever spell or grammar-checker you have available to you and also have someone else take a look at it. Check your spacing, your words, including those that might be typos due to being homophones, like they’re/there/their, bare/bear, and so on.
2. Tense – if you’re working right now, make it obvious and use the present tense. For jobs you held before, use the past tense. Sounds elementary, yes, but it’s a super common error. It’s even happened to me in the past. (Gasp!)
3. Breadth and Depth (aka the length of the dang thing!) – unless you’ve been a CEO or a master of industry, the maximum pages you get for your resume is two. If it’s coming out to 1.25 (that’s one and a quarter, yes?), go back and fix the margins, fonts, etc. Get it to a page. In general, you only need to go back 10-15 years max, so if you’re over 40, do not give us the 20 years since graduation – unless you actually spent 20 years at one job. Got it? Good.

A noticed resume gets consideration and sometimes, an interview. And applying these simple little fixes will help get you noticed. You’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the pack. So stop the madness and go to it.

Use these simple fixes to get your resume in the best shape it’s ever been so that you can get noticed and stand out in the crowd of what seems like… a gajillion jobseekers.

I’ll be posting more articles like these and including video and freebies like resume templates in future. If you’re interested in no-BS information like this and hate spam, I’d love it if you joined my mailing list. I hate spam, too, and will never subject you to it. Oh, and if you’d like some one on one assistance with that resume or any other aspect of your job search, contact me and we’ll discuss how that can happen. Sign up today for the mailing list using the form on the right, in the sidebar.