The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
I conducted a webinar recently to talk about tips for creating a quality resume. I am enclosing an editable sample resume builder and a download of my presentation in this post.
Here are 9 points to develop a fantastic resume.
Prework: Please go to the career site, download the job description for the role, and note the skills the position needs. When you write your resume, the skills you write in the resume should match the skills the company is looking for. In short, each resume has to be customized for a job. Please use a different resume for each job. Customization involves a lot of hard work, but that is the right way to proceed. Instead of focusing on 40-50 companies (where your chances of success are almost zero), focus on 4-5 companies, where your chances of success can go up to 40-50% by networking and doing due diligence.
1) The person’s name and contact details should be at the top. In addition, the email ID should have the full name and a number, if necessary, to help differentiate it from other similar candidate names. Any fancy names email like “coolcat” or “crazycat” is a strict no. The more official, every detail in your resume is, the better. Something many people miss is that the Linkedin URL is customizable. If not customized, one will see a bunch of your name and random numbers. Take advantage of Linkedin URL customization to appear more professional.
2) Make sure that the resume has an objective. It should list what the person is looking for (internship or full-time role) along with three skills they bring to the table. The identified skills should match the job description for that role.
3) When you write your resume, mention the month and year together, especially if you have less than ten years of work experience. If you have gaps in your resume, you don’t need to mention if you have done something during that period (like entrepreneurship or sabbatical) on your resume. At the same time, the question can come back to you during an interview; hence be ready with an answer. If the gap experience is connected with the job you are looking for, you can mention that on your resume.
4) Everybody should target a one-page resume. Two-page job resumes are only for candidates with more than 15-20 years of work experience. All students should use a one-page job resume but can create a separate two-page research resume for higher studies. Only Professors tolerate a more than one-page resume.
5) The formatting for the resume should be perfect. There should be no pronunciation errors or additional spaces anywhere. Fonts and italics have to be consistent throughout the resume. All the text outside the headings should be the same 10-12 points (preferably Times New Roman or Arial). Every resume also needs to follow a standard template. The only exception to the one-page standard resume is for computer science (CS) students, who can split the resume page into two sections to include all their CS projects in one single page. Every other discipline, including management aspirants, should stick to the standard resume.
More formatting tips:
6) Never mention personal details like your complete home address, father’s name, date of birth, gender, age, etc., on your resume. Doing so makes you look like a novice. Similarly, never use abbreviations when writing your resume. Expand it whenever possible. Likewise, job resumes don’t need references. Refrain from mentioning references anywhere.
7) Whenever you write your accomplishments in a company, the sentence should begin with a bullet point and an action verb. Then, you should list the actions and the results. A resume bullet is only meaningful if actions have quantifiable results. Hence think hard about how you would quantify the activities in terms of an efficiency increase, productivity increase, cost savings, etc. Of course, not every action is quantifiable, but in a resume, you should enclose only quantifiable measures. Examples of action verbs are given below:
8) Always list your experiences in reverse chronological order. If you have too many experiences, list down your most relevant experiences for your job in the one-page resume. Recruiters understand that they may need to go to Linkedin to learn about your experiences. Hence list down every bit of data on Linkedin and just put up the summary as your resume. When recruiters go to your Linkedin profile, the headshot you have should be very professional. Hence invest in getting a professional photo shot. I will cover many things about bettering your Linkedin Profile in a separate post.
9) List a section at the bottom called skills and mention your proficiency in skills relevant to the job (and described in the Job Description). Similarly, writing about hobbies is only helpful if you have a world record in something unique. In the same vein, extracurricular experience or leadership experience makes sense only if it ties in with the skills defined in the JD, and it is truly an exceptional achievement that less than 3% of peers in your cohort can have achieved.
Conclusion: Unfortunately, a resume is the only data point the recruiter has about you when deciding whether to allow you into interviews. So an applicant has to leave the best impression possible. What difference does a trifling mistake here or there make? The answer is twofold.
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