Writing Resume-Some Tips

Think of your resume as a marketing tool—like a magazine ad or a television commercial. Its purpose is to grab the attention of an individual in a relatively short period of time. Recruiters will typically spend between 20-30 seconds skimming over each resume—not a lot of time for you to get your message across. See a sample resume

All effective resumes have three factors in common:

(1) Individuality: A resume should be a reflection of you as a potential candidate—not your roommate or your sister. So while it’s o.k. to look at other’s resumes for writing and format tips, make sure that your strengths—the things that make you stand out from others—are showcased on your resume.

Identifying your strengths is one of the most important parts of a successful job search, but also one of the most difficult. Here’s a few areas to focus on:

Education: High grade point average, academic honors (i.e. Dean’s list), scholarships, academic minors or specializations, etc.

Experience: Summer or fulltime jobs, internships, research projects, programming projects, freelance or volunteer work, etc.

Activities: Membership in high school or college organizations (particularly those in which you held a leadership position), volunteer organizations, etc.

‘Intangibles’: These are perhaps the most difficult of all to identify. Maybe you’re good at finding creative solutions to problems, or at learning things quickly. Or maybe you’re a great team player. These skills aren’t as easy to quantify as a grade point average, but they’re very marketable nonetheless.

So, if a group of three CS students sat down and examined their backgrounds in relation to these four areas, one student may identify their strengths as a strong academic background coupled with leadership skills and programming expertise, while another may list relevant work experience coupled with teamwork skills and communication skills, while the third student would identify their academic background combining coursework in Business and Computer Science as their top strength. Six months later, these three students would likely have changes in their skill sets as their academic and experience backgrounds changed. For this reason, resumes should be reviewed and updated periodically to ensure that the document is accurately outlining your candidacy right now—at this point in your career.

If you’re having problems identifying your skills, ask a friend to help—other people often can see our talents more clearly then we ourselves can.

Of course, identifying your skills is just the first step—you’ll also need to provide evidence of possessing these skills. Go to the Interviewing Tips section for more information on this process.

After identifying your strengths, the next step is to highlight them on your resume. One of the ways to do this is through use of a ‘Skills Objective’ This type of objective tells an employer what you have to offer, rather than what you’re looking for. A Skills Objective is used on the accompanying Sample Resume.

(2) Readability: As mentioned earlier, resumes are often skimmed rather than carefully read. To increase your resume’s readability, make sure that you list your strongest qualifications first on the page. For example, most students list their educational background first; more experienced candidates would most likely list their employment history before their education.

Also, use ‘action style writing’ to describe your accomplishments (write in phrases rather than sentences, and begin each phrase with an action verb such as ‘managed’, ‘programmed’, ‘designed’, ‘initiated’, etc.

(3) Appearance: Nothing kills a resume faster than a bad appearance. No matter how well qualified a candidate, a poorly designed and mistake-filled resume can scuttle any chance that you had with a company.

The Number One appearance killer? Misspellings. Recruiters may skim over resumes very rapidly, but they have a knack for spotting typos. And typos and misspellings might convey a message that’s both unintended and unfair (sloppiness, poor attention to detail, etc.)

Go over your resume very carefully before going out and getting 100 copies made, or (worse) sending it out (typos and all) to a couple of dozen recruiters. Use software such as SpellCheck, but don’t rely on it. Look over it word by word. If you don’t trust your own spelling abilities, have a friend (or friends) go over your resume as well.

Another common resume mistake that can ruin its appearance is overcrowding of text. If you’re trying to shorten your resume down to one page it may not be advisable to accomplish this by eliminating any and all blank spaces. Generally, it’s best to leave enough ‘white space’ on the page so that the individual sections of the resume can be readily spotted.