Step 1: Focus

Focus-decide what you type of job you will be applying. Objectives are not required on a resume. There is nothing wrong with using an objective statement on a resume, provided it does not limit your job choices.   Keep it short and to the point.   This should showcase your professional goal, but with an emphasis on what you bring to the employer, not what the employer can do for you.

Step 2:  Education

List any relevant education or training. If you are a recent college grad and have little relevant experience, then your education section will be placed at the top of your resume.   As you gain more experience, your education almost always gravitates to the bottom.

If you participated in college activities or received any honors or completed any notable projects that relate directly to your target job, this is the place to list them.

Showing high school education and activities on a resume is only appropriate when you are under 20 and have no education or training beyond high school.   Once you have completed either college or specialized technical training, drop your high school information altogether.

Look at your resume from the perspective of a potential employer.   Don’t waste space by listing training that is not directly or indirectly related to your target job.

Step 3:   Job Descriptions

Make a copy of the applicable descriptions, highlight anything you have done in your past or present jobs.   Job descriptions are important sources of keywords, pay attention to nouns and phrases that you can incorporate into your own resume.

Step 4:   Keywords

Make sure you know the buzzwords of your industry and incorporate them into your resume. Keywords are the nouns or short phrases that describe your experience and education that might be used to find your resume in a keyword search of a resume database.   They are the essential knowledge, abilities, skills required to do your job.   It is better to spell out an abbreviation if there could be any possible confusion.   Keywords are the backbone for resume scanning technology. Soft skills are often not included in search criteria, such as: “communicate effectively,” “self-motivated,” “team player,” and so on.  These are great for describing your abilities and are fine to include in your profile, but concentrate more on your hard skills and always tell the truth.

Step 5:   Your jobs

Starting with your present position, list the title of every job you have held, along with the name of the company, the dates you worked there, city and state. You don’t need to list addresses and zip codes.

Be consistent throughout your resume.  For instance, don’t use months some of the time and years alone within the same section.  Consistency of style is important on a resume, that consistency makes your resume neat, clean and easy to read. Entry-level candidates include internships, co-ops or unpaid experiences.

Step 6:  Duties

Under each job make a list of your duties, incorporating phrases from the job descriptions wherever they apply. (Dictionary of Occupational Titles: http://stats.bls.gov/oco/oco1002.htm.)

Step 7:  Accomplishments

Go back to each job and think about what you might have done above and beyond the call of duty. 

• What did you contribute to each of your jobs?
• Did you exceed sales?
• Did you save the company money?
• Did you generate a new product?
• Did you control expenses or make work easier?
• Did you expand business or attract/retain customers?
• Did you solve a problem?
• Did you do something that made the company more competitive?

Write down any accomplishments that show potential employers what you have done in the past.  This translates into what you might be able to do for them. Numbers are always impressive.

Step 8:  Delete

Go over everything, cross out those things that don’t relate to your target job.  Your resume is an enticer, a way to get your foot in the door.  It isn’t intended to be all-inclusive.  Be careful not to delete sentences that contain the keywords you identified in step four.

Step 9:  Sentences

Never use personal pronouns in your resume (I, my, me).  Writing in the third person makes your sentences more powerful and attention grabbing.  Make sentences positive, brief, accurate.  Use verbs at the beginning of each sentence (designed, supervised, managed, developed, formulated, and so on) to make them more powerful. (see power verb list)

Step 10:  Rearrange

Go back over what you have written, think about their order of presentation. Start with the most important description of what you did for each job.  Again think logically and from the perspective of a potential employer.  Make the thoughts flow.

Step 11:  Related Qualifications

Think about anything else that might qualify you for the job objective.  Place this at the bottom of your resume. This includes licenses, certifications, affiliations, interests(only if they relate).

Step 12:  Profile

Write 4-5 sentences that give an overview of your qualifications. This profile or qualifications summary, should be placed at the beginning of your resume.  You can include some of your personal traits or special skills that might be difficult to get across in your job descriptions.

Samples:

• Experienced systems/network technician with significant communications and technical control experience.
• Focused and hard working; willing to go the extra mile for the customer.
• Skilled in troubleshooting complex problems by thinking outside the box.
• Possesses a high degree of professionalism.
• Effective team player with outstanding communication and interpersonal skills.
• Current top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information security clearance.

Busy recruiters spend as little as ten seconds deciding whether to read a resume from top to bottom. You will be lucky if the first third of your resume gets read, so make sure the information at the top entices the reader to read it all.

Creating a Resume

How long should my resume be?  It should be long enough to entice them to call you for an interview.  This is a marketing tool, not you’re autobiography. Use common sense. If you are just graduating, have fewer than 10 yrs of work experience, a one page resume will probably suffice.  If you have more than 10 yrs experience and a track record of accomplishments, you may need 2 pages to tell your story.   Ask yourself:

• Can a hiring manager see my main credentials within 10-15 seconds?
• Does critical information jump off the page?
• Do I effectively sell myself on the top quarter of the first page?
• It should only include the information that will help you land an interview.
• Avoid repeating information/focus on your accomplishments in each position.
• Eliminate old experience. If you have a long career history, focus on the last 10 years.
• Don’t include irrelevant information such as hobbies and personal information.
• Cut down on job duties, highlight the scope of your responsibilities. Use the most impressive accomplishments.
• Remove “References available upon request”. Unless you are using this as a design element, remove it.
• Use telegraphic writing style. Eliminate personal pronouns.
• Edit unnecessary words. Such as:  “responsible for”, “duties include,”  they understand you were responsible for the duties listed.
• Customize your resume for your job target. Only include information relevant to your goal.
• If you are a student or recent grad, list your GPA if it is 3.0 or higher.  Add your major GPA if it’s higher than your overall GPA. As your career progresses, college GPA becomes less important and can be removed.

 Paper

Print resume on a high-quality, light-colored paper (white, off-white, or very light gray). Never use papers with a background (pictures, marble shades, or speckles).  The scanner tries to interpret the patterns and dots as letters.  This is a good rule to follow even for paper resumes that will never be scanned. Often companies will photocopy your resume to hand to a hiring manager and dark colors or patterns will simply turn into dark masses that make your resume difficult to read.  If a company has multiple locations, the original resume may even get faxed from one site to another and the same thing happens.

• Avoid using photocopies of your resume.  Original laser printed masters are best.  Print on only one side of the page and use standard-size, 8½ x 11 paper.
• Don’t fold your resume since the creases make it harder to scan.  It is much better to invest in flat, 9 x 12 envelopes and an extra two bits of postage to make a good first impression.
• Don’t staple resume and cover letter together.

Cover letter

Can I use a stock cover letter?  Forget it! A stock cover letter and resume won’t get you anywhere except wondering why you’re passed over time and time again.  Do the research you’ll need to do to make a good impression, then turn that information and your intuition into a winning “marketing document”

Avoid beginning sentences with “I” or “my.”  Instead focus on the employer’s needs and demonstrate how your skills, achievements and track record would benefit the recipient’s organization.

In your job search

Use the internet, talk to professors in your program, campus career counselor, network and work through your school’s career services office.  Don’t use one avenue as your whole job search.

Tips for creating a scannable resume

• One of the most important factors is whether or not letters touch each other. Scanning systems have difficulty interpreting characters that are melded into one.  So, make sure no characters touch each other.  Italics and bold are both fine, as long as the letters do not touch.
• Choose a common, non-decorative font and keep the font size between 10 and 12 points.
• Underlining and horizontal/vertical lines are OK, as long as the lines do not touch any of the letters.
• Avoid columns (the optimal character recognition program reads the text from left to right).
• Do not use round, hollow bullets because they may be interpreted as the letter o. Choose round, solid bullets.
• Do not use ampersands, percent signs or foreign characters because they may not translate properly.
• Add a space between slashes so they don’t touch the letters (e.g., IT / IS ).
• Use light-colored paper (white is best ) and avoid paper that contains dark speckles.
• Do not staple your resume.
• Mail your resume in a flat envelope.  If you fold your resume and the crease lands on a line of text, the toner may flake off and render the entire line unreadable.
• Make sure you have keywords located throughout your resume so you will be found in a database search.