All too often people attempt to use their resumes as an all-encompassing document of their work lives, but Swain told Blavity that without results, your day-to-day tasks have no place on your resume.

“Lead with your achievements,” she said.

Swain pointed to an example of a resume where a client wrote about various logo designs for the dance and art departments. She changed that sentence to conceptualize 18-plus logos and graphic designs, leveraging Adobe Creative Suite for dance in art departments to elevate Richmond High School’s brand equity.

“This method is called X, Y, Z,” Swain said. “So we’ll say you achieved X that resulted in Y with a Z impact. So the Y would be, what tools did you use? Did you do research? What did you do to get to that goal? And the Z is the impact. So, she didn’t create these logos. What’s happening is that she was able to help student engagement and retention by actually having better-looking graphics because it enticed students to go to the events.”

Recruiters scan resumes quickly, so using the correct language in your resume is essential to landing a job.

“Don’t forget to leverage the systems and tools because that’s also going to open up doors for you when recruiters are quickly scanning,” Swain said. “So because she knows Adobe, she may know SEO, things like that. That’s gonna work in her favor for these recruiters. She just said she created various logos. She didn’t have a number. She didn’t talk about the tools, so that’s a huge difference.”

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