Job seekers on the hunt for new opportunities would do well to take a serious look at their resumes and raise the standards for their current job search - especially since a Recruiter Nation survey by JobVite last year showed 69 percent of recruiters reported their hiring increased in 2016 and almost 40 percent cited it increased significantly.

That same report revealed amplified job seeker optimism (50 percent), and when combined with lower unemployment rates, a climate where recruiters are competing for talent emerged.

So why not be ready with a resume that will surely get you noticed?

Here are three tips for writing a competitive resume that gets interviews:

1. Address Culture Fit Immediately. We don't talk about culture fit much when it comes to resumes because we’re always giving advice about keywords, formatting, branding and career experience.

However, in the aforementioned survey, second to job experience (67 percent), recruiters rated culture fit of high importance (60 percent) when making a hiring decision. Your resume and cover letter are the best place to start emphasizing your cultural fit for the organization.

How do you find out what the company’s culture is like?

• Talk to current employees and managers.

• Review the company’s website.

• Facebook and LinkedIn are perfect places to follow the company to learn more about its culture.

Once you've learned more about what the culture is like, make sure you explain how you’re a good fit within that culture. You can do this via relevant examples of past experiences or by telling them in your cover letter why you’re a fit. Recruiters also said the number-one way they evaluate culture fit is communication style. Keep that in mind when writing your resume, and cover letter, too. 

2. Visuals Are Important. Visual representation of data is becoming increasingly required, even on resumes. Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Our society as a whole is becoming more visually dependent. I encourage you to be ahead of the curve when it comes to communicating with visuals because this isn’t going away in our increasingly tech-dependent society.

As a side note, visuals don’t incorporate well into applicant tracking software (ATS), so if you're applying online use your ATS version. Try not to put all of your job-search eggs into the online job-search basket, though, since the results are much less impressive than referrals, networking, being promoted from within and tapping into the hidden job market. 

3. Follow Up. Following up on your resume is vital. The majority of job seekers, no matter how they apply, never follow up on their resumes. If the majority of candidates never follow up with the recruiter, then you have the advantage by doing so.

As the old adage goes: out of sight, out of mind. You don’t have to follow up every day or even once a week, but checking in periodically could prove beneficial to your job search.

– Jessica Holbrook Hernandez

About the Author: Jessica H. Hernandez is president and CEO of Great Resumes Fast, greatresumesfast.com, a values-based executive resume writing service for accomplished and emerging executives. A certified social branding analyst, veteran career expert and former recruiter for Fortune 500 companies, Hernandez and her team create one-of-a-kind, strategically branded resumes and LinkedIn profiles for busy executives.