With the job market saturated - often with thousands of job applicants per job posting, it has become more and more important for job seekers to find effective and even creative ways to entice recruiters and potential employers to review their resume. More often than not, a job opening ends up receiving  exceedingly more applicants than can be reviewed. Unfortunately this leads to many qualified applicants submiting resumes that get overlooked or simply missed.

Hence the onus is on the job seeker to apply for jobs they are qualified for, follow up with the hiring company, and somehow find ways to improve the possibilities of their resume to be read by human eyes.

Besides including the obvious information (ie. your name, phone number, address, education, and a listing of your work history), here are 6 tips on how to make your resume more attractive for the potential employer: 

If you are applying to a sales role, reflect on your past or current work experience and include relevant statements such as:

"Increased sales by x% with 6 months"

"Increased profitablity for division by x%"

"Acquired 20 new accounts within  x months"

If you are applying to a Human Resources or management role with supervisory and people management accountability, reflect on your past or current work experience and include relevant statements such as:

"Reduced turnover by x%  by implementing a corporate wide talent acquisition strategy"

If you are applying to an Accounting, Controller, or Project Management role that requires budgetary responsibilities, reflect on your past or current work experience and include relevant statements such as:

"Reduced operating expenses by x% within 2 years"

"Delivered a multi million dollar project under budget and on time"

If you are applying to a Customer Service or Call Centre role, reflect on your past or current work experience and include relevant statements such as:

"Coached and mentored x new hires, thereby facilitating their eventual promotions to team leaders"

"Improved customer service satisfaction index by x% within x months by implementing a new training program"

If you are seeking a technical job such as a Network Specialist or a Network Architect, reflect on your past or current work experience and include relevant statements such as:

"Designed a network with fail over capabilities that has achieved 99.999% uptime."

As can be seen by the examples above, a powerful resume will always demonstrate not only the "what" but also the "how in a candidate. It answers the question of "how well did you perform in your last job?" rather than simply "what did you do in your last job?"