Whether you’re new to the job market or have been gainfully employed for years, when it comes time for a career change, you’ll need a stellar resume to represent yourself to potential employers in today’s tough job market. Not sure where to begin? Peruse the following tips on bringing your outdated resume into the 21st century and you’ll be sitting pretty in your new office in no time.
The Cardinal Rule
First and foremost is the cardinal rule of resume writing: Keep it to one page. No matter how much you may be convinced you need every last word of those two pages you have, you probably don’t. In the hundreds of resumes I’ve edited, I can remember only two or three that I felt truly merited more than one page of space, and that was because the people had relevant work experience spanning 35 years or more and were applying for extremely high-level positions.
For the other 99.9 percent of us who are typically applying for entry- or mid-level positions, a one-page resume is crucial. Reason being, in this tough economy, employers simply get far too much response to their openings to be able to rifle through page after page from each and every applicant. A clean, crisp and confident one-page resume that is informative yet to the point, coupled with a compelling cover letter to sell yourself, will always win an employer’s attention over a competing applicant’s lilac-scented, chartreuse-colored five pages of everything they’ve done since high school.
Paint a Picture
With this in mind, think of your resume as a concise, professional portrait of your education, experience and skills relevant to the job for which you are applying. You can either paint that portrait like a Picasso, with colorful, appealing description that makes you truly stand out, or you can scrawl a poorly thought-out, black and white stick figure drawing like a preschooler. The latter, of course, will get your resume thrown right into the “same old mediocre candidate” pile by employers.
What will keep you away from that pile, on the other hand, is a succinct and noteworthy resume detailing all the fabulous things you’ve told them about yourself in your brilliant cover letter (see my next article for EditAvenue.com on Writing A Winning Cover Letter Every Time for more information in the cover letter department). Essentially, a good resume should start with three categories – education, experience and skills. Most everything you are going to want to showcase to a potential employer can fit into one of these categories.
For education, obviously you list what college you graduated from and what you studied, but this category is also where you would detail any specialized training courses you’ve taken, licensure programs you’ve attended and tested for, or continuing education you’ve completed. Including dates of college graduation is not recommended, since this can lead employers to judge you on age (either too young or too old), so keep the specific dates in this category to a minimum – only if they are absolutely necessary to list.
For experience, you should have a reverse-ordered list of all of your relevant job experience, with the job title, employer name, city and state, and dates you worked at the job. Then, you will want to list – in descriptive, confident language using action verbs to start each bullet – the various duties you were responsible for in the position. Typically, four strongly written bullet points is enough here, unless you were with a company 15+ years wearing many different hats. And don’t be afraid to brag a little here – let the reader know that you weren’t just an employee at your former companies, but a loyal, hard-working and valued employee who made a real difference at your former workplaces.
The skills category encompasses a wide array of things you may want to include on your resume, such as languages you know, computer programs you can run, specific office functions you can perform and machines you can operate. Again, using action verbs to start this bulleted list of skills is essential. For instance, rather than just listing “* MS Word, MS Excel and Outlook Express” as a bullet point, listing “* Possess expert knowledge of MS Word, MS Excel and Outlook Express” appears much more compelling. When at a loss for a good action verb to start bullet points out, don’t hesitate to use the thesaurus function in MS Word to help punch up a more boring or already used verb. It’s an indispensable resource.
Occasionally, there may be reason to add another category on your resume – for instance, if you work in a profession that requires a lot of certifications and you need to list all of them. Most of the time, however, the skills category is generic enough that you can include any vital data that doesn’t fit into education or experience there.
Out With The Old
Speaking of other categories, perhaps your existing, outdated resume has a category called “Objective” at the top of the page, or maybe a “References available upon request” at the bottom of the page. While useful at one time – in the days when employers asked for only a copy of your resume to consider you for a position – neither of these categories are needed today. The age of the “resume with cover letter” is upon us, and employers not only expect a good, comprehensive cover letter with your resume these days, most of them demand it plainly in their ads. Hence, the cover letter is the place to explain to employers your professional objectives, as well as offer references at their request.
Another vital category to leave off of your resume is personal information. It goes without saying that, unless specifically requested, your hobbies, marital status, number of children, religious beliefs or even your birth date have no place on a professional resume. But more subtle personal details, such as specific graduation dates from college and references to sex or race, leave you open to be judged on paper by a potential employer before they even meet you in person. Of course, it’s illegal to discriminate based on such criteria, but it still happens, so best to protect against the chance of it happening to you by eliminating too much personal information on your resume.
Don’t Forget Formatting
Finally, once you’ve written a resume worthy of your most ideal employer, it’s time to make sure your formatting doesn’t interfere with the information delivery. Three areas to think about are margins and tabs, text size and font type.
While the norm for page margins on a resume is one inch all the way around, if you have a wealth of data to fit onto the page, you can get away with as small as half-inch margins. Remember, too, though that a great way to gain space on the resume page is to keep your tabbing to a minimum. We’ve probably all seen the sleek resumes that tab in once for category names, then tab in to the center of the page to begin their text for each category. Not only is this a colossal waste of space, but it’s usually just plain overkill. While it may look distinctive, one’s eye is required to dance all around the page to get the information – not very ideal for a busy potential employer.
Text size is typically 12 point on most documents, but again, for a resume into which you’re squeezing a lot of information, you can go as low as 10 point without sacrificing quality. Of course, this assumes that you will use an easy-to-read, common font for your resume (Times New Roman is my first choice). Often times, in an effort to make their resumes stand out, job hunters will use a flashy, but hard to read, font for their name and address, or even throughout the entire document. While the font may appear cutting edge, the resume unfortunately comes off as unprofessional, cluttered and hard on the eyes. A good compromise if you just can’t live without your fancy font is to use a sans serif font (Arial or Georgia are nice) only on your name at the top of the page in bold 16-point text. Making your name larger assures it doesn’t get lost on the page, too, so that it will stick in an employer’s mind as he read over your resume.
In summary, the key to crafting a stand-out resume that will impress even the most scrutinizing employer is knowing how to use it to paint a compelling and succinct professional picture of your education, experience and skills – all on one page. It’s a tall order, but by following the tips listed above, you will be well on your way to putting your best face forward next time you mail out your updated, impressive resume to a potential employer.
