Our Southwest Careers Team is thrilled that you’re looking to join our Southwest Family! The first step in the exciting application process is reviewing the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for an available opportunity. From there, we hope you take your experience and indicate how it makes you a great Candidate for the role through tailoring your resume. When doing so, remember to:
- Read the job description and take note of key skills and qualifications for the role. Capture your relevant experience that matches those in the job description in the skills or work experience sections of your resume.
- Include work experience and achievements relevant to the role.
- Bullet points communicate how your experience and skills relate to the targeted position.
- Utilizing action verbs and language from the job description allows you to highlight your skills that correlate to the desired role effectively.
- Read the job description carefully for “required/must have” and “preferred” skills.
- “Required/must have” skills outline the minimum qualifications for the position. If you don’t meet these qualifications, you may not receive consideration for the role.
- “Preferred skills” outline additional skills that aren’t required to apply but are desired skills.
Don’t forget to save the job description after applying! Once the position is no longer open for applications, it’s not available to access. Saving the job description allows you to go reread details and take notes for a potential interview.
Below, we’ve provided examples on how you can tailor your resume to speak to those required or preferred skills. In this first example, the Candidate tailors their resume to apply for an opportunity in our Customer Relations Department.
The Customer Relations Department is passionate about helping people, providing Legendary Customer Service, delivering Hospitality through social and email communications, and connecting People to what’s important in their lives. See how this Candidate from a local nonprofit tailored their resume to speak to the specific details in the Customer Relations job description:
This Candidate understood from the job description that communication, including de-escalation techniques and tracking metrics, were of great importance to the role. Although it’s likely you, as a Candidate, possess many other skills or career highlights, this Candidate stuck to relevant information to ensure our Careers Team could quickly identify that the Candidate met the requirements and even exceed them.
Pro tip: It’s okay to have more than one resume! You can have one for everything you’ve done and other copies that you’ve tailored for specific roles.
Next, is a Candidate tailoring their resume to a Manager role.
This Manager role is focused on driving their Teams through projects to achieve the necessary results, which includes a strong problem solving and project management mindset, and strives to establish collaborative partnerships both within and outside of their Teams. See how this Manager Candidate tailored their resume to highlight their skills and abilities to present themselves as a great Candidate:
In both of these examples, the Candidates fine-tuned the information already on their resume to better present the knowledge they’d bring to these opportunities. They utilized verbiage similar to that in the job description to highlight their skills, and ensured the formatting and information presented was both relevant and easy for our Careers Team to read.
We hope you find this information helpful as you explore a career at Southwest. We’re excited to add new Employees to our Southwest Family, and we look forward to meeting the Candidate behind the tailored resume soon!
Need help completing the application process? Check out our tips on how to apply for a job at Southwest.