Write More Powerful Resumes with These 7 Tips

Powerful, targeted resumes that showcase your strengths for a specific position are critical to getting interviews, yet many women don’t know how to write a resume that will get results. Many women fall short in communicating their strengths. You might be one of them, and many women suspect that they could be doing a better job.

Use keyword-rich, industry-oriented language

Women communicate differently in their resumes. A recruiting tech firm partnered with a university to study differentiating language in resumes across four industries. Below are the top 10 most differentiating words (the most different between men and women) in the two industries. Some of the differences may be driven by factors such as the type of job they were applying for. However, in general, the female language is softer and less industry-specific.

How can you make sure you are using powerful keywords?

Step One: go through the job posting IN DETAIL and highlight keywords (skills, experience, education, personal qualities). Also use AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to help parse the job postings for keywords.

Step Two: Include these keywords across your resume: in your Summary at the top, Experience section, and Skills section. Write keyword-rich achievement-oriented bullet points for your Experience section to provide context for how you used that skill. In other words, tell a story so the recruiter can envision how you used that skill.

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Own your awesomeness, and focus less on teams

Harvard Business Review research shows that no matter what the job, women describe themselves more in terms of the group rather than the self. In our society, and for U.S. hiring managers, this does not cut it. Snyder’s research above showed the same.

Men and women not only describe others differently but also represent themselves, as job applicants, differently, and it is not solely attributable to the different experiences that they have had. Women simply seem to choose more communal words to describe themselves than do men. Unfortunately, though, these communal word choices often have negative implications.

Harvard Business Review

While being able to contribute effectively to a team is important, it is generally not a primary skill that recruiters are seeking. Your job with your resumes is to get interviews, and you can highlight your team contributions during interviews as appropriate.

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Edit your resumes to make each word count

In an analysis of 1,100 resumes from the tech sector, Kieran Snyder (CEO of Textio, a machine learning company that analyzes job listings to make them more effective) found some interesting gender differences. These differences have the potential to torpedo your job search because many of the differences make it tougher for recruiters to immediately see women’s skills and achievements.

Your job is to make it as easy as possible for a recruiter to quickly understand your potential value.  

Snyder’s study found that women’s resumes contained on average 80% more words than men’s.

There is nothing wrong with having a longer resume if those extra words are selling your strengths and not just filler. Multiple studies show that two-page resumes get more responses from recruiters than one-page resumes. So, longer is not in and of itself a problem, but recruiters spend an average of 7 seconds skimming your resume, so you need to make each word count.

If you need help making sure your resumes are as powerful as they can be, schedule a resume review with me and we can review them together!

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Include a Summary at the top of your resumes

Women in Snyder’s study were twice as likely to include professional summaries at the top of their documents and this is a great idea.

While you don’t want long narratives to describe work experiences, having a narrative summary section can be impactful since it allows you to tie together the 2 or 3 things about your education, experiences, and skills that make you a great fit for the job. You can also weave personal characteristics that might be relevant into your summary.

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

• 10+ years building Product Strategy and Teams in high-growth stage companies
• Extensive industry experience in B2B Enterprise SaaS for Fortune 500 customers
• Robust track record of socializing vision, ensuring product-market fit, and driving exponential growth.

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Focus on your achievements and quantify when possible

Despite writing longer resumes, women in Snyder’s study provided less detail about their work achievements. They were instead more likely to write a summary of the overall job they performed.

What is an achievement? Anything related to the job you are applying for where you had a goal and met or exceeded it.

Recruiters care about related achievements. These are usually from work but can also be from other experiences. If the achievement will make a recruiter say “Wow, I can see how she will make an immediate contribution in this role” then include it.

Achievements don’t have to be earth-shaking. Many people can’t articulate them because they seem so natural. They just need to be related, believable, and clearly stated.

Quantified achievements are more impactful because numbers attract the eye and provide context and substance. When you write your bullet points, start with the achievement, and then provide additional detail.

Include keywords related to the tools, processes, software, etc. that you used to accomplish your goal. This is much more powerful that just claiming that you know Excel, for example.

Here is a weak statement:

Worked to improve employee morale by fielding a survey to assess engagement.

And here is a much stronger version:

Improved employee engagement significantly by creating and fielding a survey using Qualtrics which resulted in a 57% response rate (2X the historic rate); implemented the top 3 ideas with senior management buy-in.

Women also included more personal or academic awards than men, but these are typically much less important to recruiters than quantified achievements related to the job. For women who slaved to get that 4.0 in college, it can be a harsh reality that once you leave school, nobody in the workplace cares.

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Use bullet points, not paragraphs

Men in the study were also more likely to include a bulleted list of their work history. 91% of male resumes in the study included bulleted lists, compared to just 36% of the women’s resumes.

Bullet points make your resume information easy to process.

Eye-tracking and other studies show that bulleted lists make information much easier for readers to process than long paragraphs. 

Bullet points also make your resume impactful.

They give you a chance to start each statement off with an achievement verb, which is more action-oriented than a narrative description.

Here is a bulleted list of how to use bullet points 😉:

• State your title, company, and dates of employment, then include one more non-bulleted line that is a summary of your overall job and includes some context about the company.
• Follow this with achievement-focused bullet points.
• Don’t use the word “I” in your bullet points (it’s understood).
• Incorporate relevant keywords and enough context for the reader to understand your role in the achievement.
• Remove extraneous words that don’t add anything to the reader’s understanding.
• Use up to 2 lines for a more robust and detailed description with more keywords.

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Use action and achievement verbs on your resumes

When crafting your bullet points, think about action and achievement verbs. Many women write in a passive voice on their resumes, as if their projects accomplished themselves! Action verbs make your actions the focus, and achievement verbs relate to a goal that you had that you either met or exceeded. If you can quantify, even better.

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Write a powerful, bulleted Summary

Below is a representative female experience example from Snyder’s study…

Why is this weak?

• It’s a narrative, so it’s harder to read than bullet points.
• It focuses on team participation, and not on individual achievements. What did this engineer do to contribute to the new automatic tracking platform?
• Hiring four new team members is very transactional – did this engineer supervise them? Invest in their professional development? What skills did this person use related to their staff?
• Partnering with product management and marketing is again very team-focused and the reader has no idea what the individual contributions were.
• Software is a very technical field, and this narrative does not use technical language.
• Being listed on 3 patents is nice, but use the numeral 3, not the word “three.” Eye-tracking studies show that people are drawn to numbers on resumes. Company recognitions are not as important to recruiters as other achievements.

In contrast, here is a representative male example from the same study…

Why is this stronger?

It is more declarative, more action-oriented, more focused on individual achievements, and uses more technical language.

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You don’t need to be in a technical field to write achievement-oriented bullet points.

Here is an example from one of my clients, a nonprofit psychology grad with fewer technical skills than someone in software. She was able to recognize her achievements and write about them in a declarative, action-oriented format to provide quantified, achievement-oriented bullet points:

You don’t need to be an egomaniac either!

“I’m not comfortable bragging!”

This is a very common pushback from my clients. Women are often socialized to be humble, but take a lesson from this quote:

It’s not bragging if you can back it up.

Muhammad Ali

You should never lie on your resume, but you can present your achievements in the strongest possible language. If you don’t sell yourself, no one else is going to do it for you.

What’s our goal here? To level the playing field. If you know the rules, you can play the game more effectively, and score those interviews.

Don’t be shy, don’t be humble, and don’t hide your superpowers!