VMock’s automatic resume review and feedback provides you with a score for your resume out of 100 points. Understanding how this score is calculated can help you to also understand how to improve your resume.
The overall score for your resume is comprised of three factors; Impact, Presentation, and Competencies.
Impact refers to the strength of your descriptions and the impression they leave on employers – are you using strong action verbs, being specific with your descriptions, and including outcomes and impact of your actions? The best way to improve your score in this area is to make sure that you are using strong action verbs to start each of your bullets and to make sure that you are including the impact or outcome of those action verbs. For example a low scoring item might be: Responsible for answering phones. Whereas a higher scoring way to write this would be: Answered 100+ phone inquiries per day directing callers to appropriate departments for their needs.
Presentation examines how your resume looks visually – this is meant to catch differences in fonts, spacing and formatting inconsistencies, misaligned bullets, and missing information. This is generally where you can see the biggest increases in your score with small changes made to your resume. Make sure that your layout is simple and easy to navigate, that you don’t use a preformatted template, and that your formatting is consistent in font, type, spacing, and color. Be sure to also make sure that you have the required sections like “Education” and “Experience” on your document and that you include all of the important information in your sections like your name, email, school and degree, dates and position titles.
Lastly, Competencies refers to key transferable skills that all employers are interested in seeing from their prospective interns or employees such as strong communication skills, leadership and taking initiative, and strong analytical or problem solving skills. These are skills you have gained through coursework, student activities, work, internships, research, volunteering, and study abroad. Take a look which items have been highlighted for each competency. Highlighted text in this instance means that you have expressed this competency well. Try to add more in areas that are Red or Yellow using the highlighted text as an example.
VMock also does a bullet level analysis for you but the feedback provided in this section overlaps in many ways with the information provided in your overall score. Your resume must be formatted with bullets in order for this analysis to work; having bullets is a good idea because people who read a lot of resumes have an easier time reading bulleted information.
VMock’s standards are very strict and getting a score of 100 should NOT be your aim. The samples created by our office are very good and score in the 80s to 90s. Once you have received your VMock score, take time with the program and make all of the changes suggested before scoring it again. You should feel comfortable sending your resume to employers if it is scoring in the low 80s.
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