Treat your resume as your personal advertisement to employers.  Does your resume sell you as the best potential employee in the stack? Does it grab the employer's attention or read like a list of generic resume clichés? Make yours unique to sell yourself! Let me share a powerful marketing tactic with you:

Benefits sell, features support.

What does that mean? Think about car advertisements. For example, airbags are a feature - you and your family surviving a horrific accident is the benefit. Gas mileage is a feature - saving an average of $500.00 a year in gas is the benefit. Features are simply facts while benefits are tangible items that evoke mental images and emotions such as love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear.

"Introduced new products" is a feature-based statement. "Developed, introduced and launched successful new products, which increased market share 5% and contributed $1 million to bottom-line profitability" is benefit-based statement.

What benefits do you offer the employer?

One easy method to make your resume statements benefits-based is to apply the "So, what?" test to them. After reading each achievement on your resume, imagine an interviewing saying "So, what?" Your response to that would be the benefit statement you need to add. It's that easy!

While we're on the topic of using marketing tactics, if you haven't grabbed their attention within the top third of the first page, you have probably made the reader's eyes glaze over and have greatly reduced your odds of making it to the interview.

Make sure it is free of misspellings and grammatical errors. They are resume (and job) killers. Have every family member and friend you know proofread your resume before you send or post it anywhere. Trust me; even the best writers make mistakes. Once an employer receives and reads your resume, it's too late to change the impression it has left on them- so make it good!

Is it written clearly? Your resume should be easy to understand and to the point. When writing clear statements, avoid using industry- and company-specific terms and acronyms. For example, there are over 100 definitions for the acronym "ATM", with more than one just within the financial world. If a Human Resource person has to ask themselves if ATM meant "Asynchronous Transfer Mode", "Automatic Teller Machine", or "At The Money?" on the resume, you've lost ground. Apply the Grandmother rule; if your grandmother wouldn't understand what you've written, you need to clarify it!

Is it written succinctly? Distill your resume to the minimum amount of words needed to get your point across; writing a resume the length of "War and Peace" won't help you much. One rule I apply is hunting and eliminating the word "that" as often as possible. Once I have finished writing, I search for the word "that" and usually can eliminate it without changing the sentence. 

The benefits statement from above:

"Developed, introduced and launched successful new products, which increased market share 5% and contributed $1 million to bottom-line profitability"

Can be distilled to:

"Developed, introduced and launched new products, increasing market share 5% and profits by $1 million"

It didn't need to state the products were successful, that is inherent by the market share and profit increase. Also, stating "bottom-line" profitability is redundant - all profits are "bottom-line" by nature.

In conclusion, make sure your resume is free from errors, clear, concise, and reads like an advertisement full of benefits which would excite a potential employer!