By Chelsea Babin

When a resume seems disjointed or all over the place it might not make a great impression on employers. Telling a cohesive story in your resume—no matter how unconnected your job experience may seem—is they key to having a resume that makes a great impression and gets your foot in the door at top-notch companies. If you want to tell a more cohesive story with your resume follow these 4 steps!

1. Lead With Skills: The top of your resume used to be the place where you’d put your “objective” but those are often vague and unhelpful to employers. Instead, include a skill bank at the top of your resume so employers can see right away what your strengths are. Then, continue to mention the important skills throughout your job experience so you create a cohesive story that shows your depth of knowledge and experience with your most important skills.

2. Focus on Similarities: Some of your jobs may seem like completely opposite positions but, if you focus on the similarities between them, you could create a more cohesive resume. While the emphasis should be on the important contributions you made in each role, the results you contributed to, and your regular tasks make sure you’re including responsibilities or traits that overlap with previous jobs so that employers can see how one job’s tasks led directly to strengths in your next position and so forth. This will make any seemingly disjointed career history flow more naturally and show that you’re a focused person who can build upon skills you learned from your eclectic experience.

3. Explain Your Growth and Changes: Growth within a position should be documented within your resume. A brief explanation for why you suddenly changed industries or career fields should be included in your resume. If you want that piece of paper to tell a cohesive story you need to include your story, not just your responsibilities at each position and the skills that you used. This will help answer employer’s questions before they ask them and they’ll get to know more about you before you ever step foot in the door at an interview.

4. Minimize the Irrelevant: While you don’t want to leave off multiple jobs and have a resume filled with job gaps that didn’t really exist, it’s important to minimize the focus on your irrelevant positions. Maybe you took a brief career detour in a field you weren’t interested in while you were waiting to find the perfect job or while you were building up the skills you needed to get into a certain industry, that’s fine! Include those positions on your resume to avoid long job gaps (which are often a red flag to employers) but don’t go into as much detail about your responsibilities at those positions so employers know not to focus on them as much as your more relevant experience.

The secret to landing an interview is a cohesive resume! When you look at your resume like a tool for telling your career story, it’s easy to understand why following the 4 aforementioned steps to a more cohesive resume could land you more interviews and lead you on a better career path.