If you’ve ever thought about picking up a resume writing book or hiring a resume writer you may want to read this before you go out and fork over any money for someone else’s ideas on the subject.
Resume writers and guides will tell you how to style your resume in much the same way that designers will help you style your website or marketing materials. But that isn’t why you need a resume. That is unless you are looking for a job as a web or graphic designer, but even in that case you will need a resume before you get into the style. Exception - if you are an artist then you may want to break the rules completely.
So here is everything that you will ever need to know about resumes:
Rule #1: You are writing your resume for a specific audience, so your resume should speak to that audience. If you are looking to get hired as a developer you don’t really need to emphasize that you are a realtor. If anything, this shows me that you are easily distracted by other things going on in your life. Focus on the things that are important for the job.
Rule #2: Your resume should be more like a short story and less like War and Peace. Actually, if you are thinking about your resume as an essay or work of literature then you need to get over this idea really fast. People do not read resumes like they read literature, they read resumes more like grocery lists. Short, sweet and to the point.
Rule #3: Your summary says it all. Objectives are goals, but summaries are for professionals who want to show their audience that they are qualified, experienced and interested in the job that that are applying for. You need to have a thesis that summarizes what you have done and why you are qualified for the job that you are applying for. This should be followed by no more than 3-5 bullet points that support your thesis. The rest of your resume will support this central thesis.
Rule #4: NEVER lie on your resume. You will have to support the lie for the rest of your career and it will catch up with you - even if you don’t know that it has. Save yourself the need to lie on your resume by writing a great summary and then supporting it with what you have done. If that isn’t enough to do it then you should be networking or do something else to help support your career direction. Note: A degree from an online university is low hanging fruit that isn’t worth the cost to you - think traditional university or certificate program or get a hobby that gives you resume experience.
Rule #5: You can easily have too many skills for your own good. A resume is a lot like a website. You can search engine optimize to drive traffic to your resume just like a website. The problem is that you don’t want to do that. Just because you used an email program on a UNIX environment when you were in college 10 years ago doesn’t mean that UNIX is a skill for you. Take this off your resume along with every other keyword that will put your in the wrong search results. Job boards suck at search and a lot of recruiters do to - you don’t want to talk to the bad recruiters out there do you? I know I wouldn’t. I made the mistake of putting Sharepoint on my resume ONCE and I got 6 calls from the same recruiter - each time I said I don’t use Sharepoint (except for on one project and not in a big way - I had only listed it in my skills). Monster.com told him that I was a Sharepoint WIZARD because I was in his search results.
Rule #6: If your education is relevent then put it at the top, if not then put it at the bottom. I don’t care where you went to highschool. If you are listing classes that you took in college 10 years ago on your resume then it is time for them to go.
Rule #7: Work experience should be concise and to the point, not paragraphs. List off the employer (not the staffing agency, though they do appreciate your plug), dates, location (city and state), then 3-10 bullets that speak to what you did there. This is where you really need to be thinking about supporting your summary (thesis). You shouldn’t repeat your summary bullet points here, but you should be expanding on them. Don’t use your job description, use what you actually did. Recruiters don’t assume that you are going to be a perfect fit for their job and neither do hiring teams, but they do look for patterns. If you don’t show them what you were doing then the pattern will not present itself. For example, if you talk about how you used Java, but don’t clarify what types of Java applications that you worked on then you are probably going to get put at the bottom of the call list by the recruiter or person reviewing resumes (if they are good, and you don’t want the bad ones calling you…).
Rules #8-10 will have to come later. Good luck!
May 20th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Good advice..and I’d like to add a bit to it from the perspective of a professional with 18 years in the careers industry.
Here’s trend we’re seeing now — what I’ve coined as the “BlackBerry effect” for resumes (perhaps one could call it the “Twitter-effect” as well). Information is being received and digested in ever smaller bites and attention spans are shrinking as multi-tasking and mobile messaging grow. Resumes need to work in this environment. And targeting is a big step.
To capture attention in all this “noise,” resumes must follow suit, be relevant to the recipient, and easily readable on mobile devices (or by harried multi-tasking execs, recruiters, and HR folks). They must speak of only what is necessary to communicate value to the target.
In this new brand of resume, impact counts far more than “responsible for” (always did) but now it is even more important than even most accomplishments.
Decide the biggest thing you’ve done in each position and what it meant short- and long-term. Then support it with critical accomplishments (dollarized, of course) and be done with it.
Bottom-line for the resume-writing/job-seeking public? If you don’t have a value prop (impact statement) that will fit on Twitter (140 characters) and get you an interview, you’re not ready to write your resume! Precision is power.