Resume Tips

Your resume is your most important marketing tool. It is worth every effort to ensure that it is accurate and that it emphasizes your skills, experiences and accomplishments in the best way.

A resume should:

Promote you. Your resume should highlight your skills, abilities, training, achievements and ambition.
Be clear and professional. It should be easy to read and follow a logical flow. Provide relevant information only.
Demonstrate that you know how to write well, write without error and are detail oriented.

Common Mistakes:

The resume contains too much information. Your resume should contain just enough information to be clear. Detail can be discussed in the interview. Never include work samples or certificates of any kind with your resume unless this was specifically requested.
Including company specific acronyms. Outside of that company, this only creates confusion and makes your resume confusing and unappealing. Be careful to only include industry acronyms when you are confident that they are widely used and understood.
Including personal information. Do not include pictures, indicate marital or family status or indicate your sex, religion, health status etc. Employers do not have the right to ask, and it distracts from the key information that you should be including.

Choose a Format

If you do some research, you’ll find there are many new and different ways ‘out there’ about how you can do your resume. We cannot definitively say how you ‘should’ do your resume, because the answer depends on who you are, what you have done, and what you are seeking. Ultimately – if your resume can showcase you in the best way then it is done well.

We can however, provide general guidance and professional opinion and we will focus on two of the most common, and more traditional, types of resumes.

Chronological Resume

Using this format, job experiences are listed starting with the most recent and working back as far as is relevant. This type of resume highlights what you have done and what you have accomplished. We will focus on this type of resume as it is the most common.

Chronological Resumes should be divided into specific sections that cover different aspects of your background and qualifications. The names of the sections can vary somewhat, but the sequence should stay the same regardless of the names you use.

Functional Resume

Using this format, categorize your experiences in terms of your skills. This type of resume highlights what you are capable of doing. This type of format can be useful if you have a lot of gaps in your work history or if you are changing careers and want to present your transferable skills.

Writing Your Resume

Remember, you are marketing yourself so you need to ‘sell’ your strengths. You are not merely describing what you have done but describing in a way that emphasizes the positive. There is a difference.
Highlight Accomplishments. Tell what you actually achieved and be specific.
Individual contributions are best, but if your team or company achieved goals that you contributed towards, then indicate that. Show you are part of something successful.
When describing what you have done, start with an action verb whenever possible. Verbs such as supervised, organized, planned, developed, tell what you have done in a way that impresses upon the reader that you have made positive contributions.
Eliminate the pronoun “I” (it ‘sounds’ better and is easier to brag about yourself when you are not referring to yourself in the first person). Use familiar terms. Use language that fits the type of job that interests you.
Limit your resume to 2 pages. Use bullet points, phrases, and short statements and avoid ‘wordiness’.
The grammar rules for a resume are different, but do exist. And spelling always counts. Review your resume and then have someone check it over and then review it again.
Be neat. Choose an easy to read, professional font such as Times New Roman (the most widely used professional font).
Keep in mind that you have approximately 10 seconds to get the attention of the person screening your resume. If you can get their attention, they will continue reading.