How to Write a Medical Sales Resume That Stands Out
You finally found the perfect Medical Sales Rep job for you. Now, all you have to do to get the hiring process started is to submit your resume. The problem is that many of your peers are probably thinking exactly the same thing. How do you stand out where you get called in for an interview ahead of all of the others?
Why Your Resume Matters
Your resume is a key part of the hiring and candidate selection process: it is the first document that your potential new employer will review to determine whether they will interview and eventually hire you. It is important to understand that employers often have limited time to review all of the applicants. Creating a strong resume can change your career path and income drastically!
Resumes communicate who you are and what you have accomplished. A resume that “stands out” in a positive way is one that has been written thoughtfully, clearly and concisely, effectively communicating your abilities and strengths in a very brief space.
We have provided six basic tips will help you build an outstanding professional resume. These tips are designed around some of the most common sections and most useful points for an effective and specific Medical Sales resume.
If you still need help after reviewing the 6 tips below we do offer a free resume review and if you do want a Certified Resume Writer to create a resume for you we start those at $49 for them to do it for you.
The 6 Resume Tips
Tip 1: How to Write an Education Section that Stands Out
The education section demonstrates that you have the academic and industry certifications to qualify for a Medical Sales Rep career. The key questions you should ask yourself while writing this section is, “Have I clearly communicated the strongest and most relevant aspects of my educational experience?” The next question is, “Is this section organized in a way that is easily readable by the employer?”
• The education section is important for all applicants but may be weighted differently depending on how long it has been since you graduated from college.
• Since you are applying for a specific job (Medical Sales) is vital to include all courses, industry certifications, and completed programs geared towards Medical Sales.
• For each listed school, provide the full name of the school or online program, Certification #’s the years of your attendance and the year of graduation or completion.
Tip 2: How to Make the Experience Section Stand Out
Along with education, your experience is one of the most important ways to show that you are qualified for a Medical Sales Rep position. Use this section to clearly convey your strongest professional experiences, whether paid or unpaid. Be sure to give detailed aspects of your roles and responsibilities for each listed position. Emphasize any relationships or similarities between your past experiences and the job you want. You should also include the start and end dates of your involvement with each organization and any key accomplishments from the role. Don’t forget to include where the company is located, including city and state.
* Ask yourself: while involved with the company, did I win any awards, get any special recognition, make new discoveries, start a new program?
* If so, what happened and what were the results? Quantify your experiences when you can! As the expression goes, “Show don’t tell.” In other words, you can more effectively convey a point by giving concrete examples, rather than through vague descriptions. Consider the following examples.
Instead of:
Improved worker productivity significantly, leading to recognition from upper management.
(A resume reader may ask: What does ‘improved’ mean? What does recognition mean? How much have you improved it by?)
Convey this:
Improved 3rd quarter returns by 25%, exceeding projections and leading to the Top Manager Award, given to only one manager in the company per year.
When it comes to language, be honest about your job functions while thinking of professional ways to present your experiences.
For entry level Medical Sales Rep applicants fall into a trap of thinking that their job or internship experience won’t sound impressive enough to list. The job may have felt like “sitting at a desk, answering the phone or dealing with customers” True, but you may have been performing other responsibilities or developing useful job-related skills without realizing that you were!
When you were at a desk, were you at the FRONT desk? Were you the only person or the main person in this position? Were you overseeing anything while you were sitting there? Were you the sole person responsible for any tasks? Did you have to learn how to deal calmly and confidently with any customer issues? Did people occasionally ask you to take on additional responsibilities, even for a short time?
Look at your accomplishment bullet and ask yourself:
1. What did I do in the job?
2. How?
3. Using what?
4. With whom?
5. To what extent or impact?
Sometimes you may need to pare down your list in order to avoid making your resume too lengthy. Try to select the accomplishments based partly on how impressive they are and partly on how well they relate to the position you want. To describe your experience, always use more than one sentence or bullet. That said, word economy in your bulleted descriptions is also important. Try to keep each bulleted description or sentence to one or two lines at most. You can often rephrase a description, eliminating words while keeping the meaning. The more information you can present clearly and concisely within the short resume format, the more the employer will understand what you can do for them.
Remember that by providing relevant details in each statement of your experience, you will give the employer enough information to evaluate you and also provide them with ideas of what they might want to discuss with you in an interview.
Tip 3: How to Create a Leadership and Activities Section that Stands Out
For many people, especially students and recent graduates, a Leadership & Activities section can be a fantastic differentiator for your resume. If you have not been in the workforce for long, or if you have only worked summers and part-time, then you may not have much relevant content to add to your Experience section. A strong Leadership & Activities section can help you fill that gap while also telling an employer something about you as a person.
When creating the section, you should first consider what student organizations and activities you would want to include. Then, you should consider what you would want to write about each one. In general, this section is much like the Experience section, except that it is about what you have done in a personal, rather than professional, setting.
Of course, because student organizations and activities are personal, you should be careful about which ones you choose to list; they should be appropriate to a professional setting. For example, you should probably not choose to share that you were chosen “Top Drinker” of your college’s “Beer Keg of the Day” club. On the other hand, if you volunteered at a food bank, wrote for a school publication, or had a membership in an honor society, those accomplishments would be worth sharing.
Most importantly, you should include student organizations and activities where you have made significant contributions or held leadership positions. Just as you did in the Experience section, you should think about what you did in the organization, any responsibilities you had, any skills you used, and any knowledge you gained. If you made improvements to the student organization or activity, definitely include concrete examples. Make sure to consider if any of your experiences with student organizations and activities could be related to the position you are applying for. Could any of the skills you have learned be useful in the job?
Tip 4: How to Highlight Your Skills
Another important component of what defines an attractive candidate in the modern economy is their skill set. Because employers want people who can quickly start being productive, they care about what skills a job prospect has, particularly in certain technical fields. In most cases, skills are incorporated into the Experience section, if you acquired skills as part of your internship or job, and in the Education section, if you obtained the skills through industry training or coursework, completed industry certifications or can show sales abilities. Sometimes people with additional skills, such as industry training or certifications will quickly place them into the interview pool so make sure you also include them in the Skills section of your resume. Whichever format you choose, you still need to emphasize the skills you have, so that an employer can easily see how you can help them.
You should ask yourself a few important questions. What skills do I have? What skills are my target employers looking for? Are my skills hard skills (i.e. product knowledge, sales abilities) or soft skills, such as the ability to listen? Lead with your strongest skills and/or the ones that seem the most marketable.
You will want to include all the relevant skills to demonstrate your qualifications for a Medical Sales job, without including too much less-relevant information which could distract from your message. Think carefully about which skills you want to include, and which could be left out. Remember to choose your words economically to maximize content in a minimum of space. With a little effort, your skills details can transform your resume from a simple list of accomplishments to a document that gets an employer thinking about all the great ways you could contribute!
Tip 5: Formatting and Making the Resume Look Professional
Believe it or not, the appearance and organization of a resume can greatly affect the response. The first hurdle for any resume is to get the employer to read it. An attractively presented, concise resume is easy for a recruiter to pick up. On the other hand, if a resume is 5 pages, written in 6-point font, a prospective employer may not think that it is worth the time to find a magnifying glass and read it. In most cases, a resume should not exceed one page (sometimes two pages, mostly for more experienced candidates, or in scientific and technical fields where publication lists can be lengthy), which has a few key sections that are separated from one another or clearly delineated.
Here are some suggestions to make the format stand out positively:
• Use 10-12-point font or larger. (10 point may even sometimes be too small, and the choice can depend on the chosen font.) Your audience should easily be able to read the size of the writing. Often prospective employers may not have perfect vision, so readability may create problems if the text is too small.
• Use a clean, professional-looking font. Don’t use fonts that are overly artistic and hinder the ability for the reader to understand them. Some find fonts like Times New Roman most clearly readable; others find competing fonts better. The font is just an aspect of the writing; don’t let it overpower the words themselves.
• Use respectable margins. Don’t try to deviate too much from 0.5 margins at either side. Also, don’t make the margins too large, beyond 0.75 or 1 unit on either side. Around 1 unit on the top and bottom should be acceptable.
• Use adequate spacing.
• Abbreviate months of employment.
• Include proper contact information. Most people include full name, address, email address and at least one phone number at the top of the document.
Tip 6: Revision and Review
One of the most important steps to writing a good Medical Sales resume is professional resume writer look it over. A small spelling or grammar error on a resume could cause problems by making it seem like you lack attention to detail.
You can start with standard spelling and grammar checking programs. However, while these programs are very helpful, they are not enough by themselves. For example, the programs may not flag errors with homophones (e.g. hair and hare). They also have difficulty with uncommon, technical, or foreign words that may not be in their dictionaries. In addition, they are not looking for formatting inconsistencies or at the overall appearance of the resume. While computer programs can help with many issues, there is still no substitute for the human eye.
Ask the reviewers to provide two types of notes: technical revisions and feedback on the writing, organization and effectiveness of the resume.
Remember, don’t take constructive criticism personally! They are trying to help you, and their points of view may be similar to that of the employer. Your goal is to create a resume that a Medical Sales staffing or human resource professional will appreciate.
Once you obtain proper feedback, you can work on improving your resume. Try to incorporate your reviewers’ suggestions. Their ideas may even make you think of other ways to improve your resume! Most importantly, always remember that once you have made your revisions, review your resume again before you send it out!
The stronger your resume, the better your chance of getting an interview and landing a meaningful job. Just by following these simple tips, you will be well on your way to resume success, creating a clear, detailed, and concise document designed to impress employers. So, get writing and get yourself noticed!
A good resume can help you land an interview, but even minor errors can take you out of the running. If you are looking for a free review of your resume just CLICK HERE.
Quick Resume Tips:
• Use the position description to decide what to include.
• Pick a standard and consistent format.
• Make sure to include industry Certifications or Credentials as almost all companies will require them.
• Describe your experiences with specificity and strong action verbs.
• Record accomplishments and contributions, not just responsibilities.
• Revise carefully!
• Don’t include personal information about your age, religion, health or marital status.
• Typically, you will not be expected to share past salary information on a resume.
• Employers assume that “references will be available upon request,” so you don’t need to include them on your resume unless asked.
• Employers may use keyword scanning on resumes, so know what words are relevant to the industry and position and ensure they appear in your resume.