If you're ready for your next opportunity in your career or even as an entrepreneur who has to pitch a contract, a cover letter will help you bridge your experience to your new potential company. Listen to this video for tips to get your cover letter ready for success and the next step - your interview!

And when it’s a job you really want - the position that's more satisfying, leveraging all of your potential, and increasing your paycheck - the resume and cover letter can feel more like an obstacle, especially if you:

• Feel like your career path has been all over the place and are unsure how to include very different experiences into a cohesive story that feels authentic and clear to a potential employer while connecting to the job you want
• Feel overly concerned about showing if you’re either over or under qualified depending on the position being applied for
• Feel overwhelmed to know how effectively articulate your experiences and skills on paper, so that the hiring...

You know your resume is a paper introduction to a potential employer.

You know its purpose is to enable you to stand out from the crowd of contenders and secure an interview.

So how can you improve the likelihood that YOUR resume is screened through?

You make it easy for the interviewer to get to know you by including a resume profile.

Ideally, the resume profile is created after you have clearly explained your work experience. It’s the equivalent of an abstract to a research paper or a book summary on the back or inside of the jacket.

The resume profile has three things:

• A summary statement brings all of your work experience together into a cohesive picture;
• Six to ten bullets that identify your overarching themes; and,
• Personality assessment results, if you have them.

Let’s break these down a little more.

The summary statement

The summary statement is a way to highlight your strongest skills and work experience, so that the hiring manager can get an...

Getting Started

Whether you are entering the workforce or changing jobs, there is one document that is your vehicle to being seen and getting your foot in the door for the interview, and that’s the resume.

There are so many styles and ways to display your skills, experience and extra activities, but if they are hard for the reader to digest or really understand what you did, then the resume is not working to your advantage.

So what can you do?

1) Make it easy to read

Although this may seem obvious, take some time to really look at how the information is laid out on the paper.
• Is the selected font a reasonable reading size and style?
• Is there enough white space to break up the text?
• Are there one or two words that could replace a phrase and still communicate clearly what you accomplished?

The easier the font, the use of white space to break up the text and streamlining words all enable your resume to be easier to read.

2) What's the “so what”?

...