How do I write a good resume?
Want to prepare good resume #any
5 answers
Wael’s Answer
Below, there are two links that would help you.
http://career.uga.edu/resumes/resume_guidelines
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/sampleresumes/a/resumeformat.htm
Ravi’s Answer
You made it! You’re out of college and its time for the real world. Most likely, school and internships have prepared you for the jobs that await you in your future. It’s your job now to get the hiring managers to notice you in a sea of new grads.
To land that interview, you’ll first need a proper resume.The topic of resume writing is often covered in the blogosphere and beyond, but your resume will be different from your dad’s or your big sister’s.
There are special considerations for a new grad’s resume — you are likely brand new to the job market, and with little (or no) experience. Certain tips can help you get through the door, and into the interview hot seat, while some mistakes might get your resume tossed.
Professional Summary
At the very top of your resume, a summary section should provide an overview of your skills and achievements and clarify what you’re looking for. Whatever you do, don’t settle for a bland, generic objective statement in this prime resume real estate.
For most job seekers, it’s best to avoid an Objective statement completely and focus on a summary of your selling points. The exceptions to this rule are new grads and career changers.
In your situation, you may need to give some indication of the type of role you’re looking for (especially if your desired career path isn’t obvious from your major and/or previous work experience). However, you can combine your objective with a description of the valuable qualities you would bring to the role in a Professional Summary.
Be sure to get specific if you want to grab your reader’s attention. Generic terms like “self starter” do have their place, but this is your introduction, your opportunity to make a great first impression.
A common mistake when you’re not yet job-search savvy is to write this section once and include it each time you send out your resume. A proper resume is one that has been fine-tuned to match the requirements sought out in the job posting.
Example: Honors graduate of St John’s University’s Communications program seeking a position in training and development. Offering hands-on experience in classroom teaching, corporate training and communication research.
Education
If your primary selling point is your education (as it often is for new grads), then it makes sense to lead your document with your educational achievements, even if you have unrelated work history to include.
Including courses completed can give your reader a greater sense of the value of your education. Include your GPA if it’s high, as this adds even more value to this section. You may also want to list relevant school activities and organizations. Later, as you gain more relevant, valuable career experience, including this type of information will become less important.
Be prepared to speak in your interview about why you chose the school that you attended, your favorite and least favorite classes, and your top achievements (academic and extracurricular).
Job History
This section trips up some recent grads with only one or two jobs under their belts. Internships are more than acceptable in this area, and should of course be included. This has the added bonus of illustrating to the potential interviewer your ability to multi-task, your propensity for leadership, and your capacity for a heavy workload.
In some cases, major school projects and significant extracurricular roles can also be included (a study-abroad experience, a group project, leading a major fundraising initiative for your club). As a recent grad, it’s understandable that your transferable skills may have been obtained in settings that were more social than professional.
On another note, related experience doesn’t have to be paid experience. It doesn’t matter if you were paid for your services. What matters is that you gained the applied skills. The hiring manager will be interested to learn how your efforts and contributions benefited those you worked for, and how the skills gained through these experiences can now benefit future and potential employers. For example, if you’re a finance major and held the position of Treasurer for a campus organization, that’s related experience – even if it’s unpaid experience – where you certainly learned relevant skills.
Achievements
This section is meant for such accomplishments as high graduating honors, awards, and scholarships. Later in your career, you may lose this section due to space considerations, but at this point it can be an impressive to potential interviewers. While keeping it succinct and easy to read, don’t be afraid to include as many important milestones as you can.
Other Sections
In the case of a resume that’s on the light side, some sections can be included to further illustrate qualifications and potential:
“Highlights of Additional Coursework” – This section can be used to explain certain in-class projects that are relevant to the job posting. For example, an advertising major may have written a campaign for a big company. Even if it is obviously not a real campaign, high marks for an innovative idea can be seen as especially impressive.
“Skills” – Sometimes used in more detailed resumes, here you can list knowledge of software programs or foreign languages.
“Interests” – If space allows, it can be useful to include some hobbies and interests (especially those that show desirable qualities such as perseverance, leadership, team orientation). This section can also prompt some nice, rapport-building small talk during the interview.
Following this simple resume map can take you past the road of application, through to the interview, and onto the destination of successfully landing a job.
Anmol Sharma
Anmol’s Answer
Hiring managers and recruiters alike say they've seen more poorly written resumes cross their desks recently than ever before. Attract more interview offers and ensure your resume doesn't eliminate you from consideration by following these six key tips:
- Format Your Resume Wisely "Do the Hiring Managers" Work for Them
No matter how well written, your resume won't get a thorough reading the first time through. Generally a resume gets scanned for 25 seconds. Scanning is more difficult if it is hard to read, poorly organized or exceeds two pages.
Use a logical format and wide margins, clean type and clear headings
Selectively apply bold and italic typeface that help guide the reader's eye
Use bullets to call attention to important points (i.e. accomplishments)
- Identify Accomplishments not Just Job Descriptions
Hiring managers, especially in technical fields like engineering, seek candidates that can help them solve a problem or satisfy a need within their company. Consequently, you can't be a solution to their problems without stating how you solved similar problems in other companies and situations.
Focus on what you did in the job, NOT what your job was there's a difference
Include a one or two top line job description first, then list your accomplishments
For each point ask yourself, What was the benefit of having done what I did?
Accomplishments should be unique to you, not just a list of what someone else did
Avoid using the generic descriptions of the jobs you originally applied for or held
- Quantify Your Accomplishments
Q: What's the most common resume mistake?
A: Making too many general claims and using too much industry jargon that does not market the candidate. A resume is a marketing document designed to sell your skills and strengths rather than just portray a bio of the candidate.
Include and highlight specific achievements that present a comprehensive picture of your marketability
Quantify your achievements to ensure greater confidence in the hiring manager and thereby generate interest percentages, dollars, number of employees, etc.
Work backwards to quantify your accomplishments by asking, If I had not done X, what could have happened?
- Cater Your Resume for the Industry
Unlike advertising and design professionals who have greater creative license in designing their resume for those fields, the mechanical engineering industry won't be impressed and may be turned off by distinctive resume design.
Err on the side of being conservative stylistically
Your accomplishments, error-free writing, grammatically-correct, clean, crisp type and paper will make the impression for you
- Replace your Objective" with a "Career Summary"
A Career Summary is designed to give a brief overview of who you are and what you do. Most Objectives sound similar: Seeking a challenging, interesting position in X where I can use my skills of X, Y, and Z to contribute to the bottom line. Not telling at all.
Grab a hiring manager's attention right from the beginning, remembering you
have only 25 few seconds to make a good impression
Spend time developing a summary that immediately gets their attention, and accurately and powerfully describes you as a solution to their problems
- Network. Network. Network.
For unemployed candidates, handing out resumes should be a full-time job. The majority of mid- to senior-level positions are filled through networking, so contact absolutely everyone you know in addition to recruiters who are in a position to hire you or share insights. Networking can include
Personal business contacts, people you've worked for or who worked for you
Vendors and sales representatives you've dealt with in the past five years
People listed in the alumni directory of your alma mater
With a solid resume in hand you'll greatly increase your odds of earning a closer look and getting that interview.
Pradeep’s Answer
What file type should I use?
There are a lot of options out there, including PDF, Microsoft Word (.doc and more recently .docx), plain text, and more.
Have your resume available in multiple formats, including PDF and Microsoft Word (.docx), which are the most common. Some employers request one format over the other for a variety of reasons, and each has its own strengths.
While a PDF document prints beautifully and retains your careful formatting, Microsoft Word documents are easy for the reader to copy and paste from, export into another format, or edit as needed. Every ATS has its own strengths and weaknesses, and some can handle certain file types better than others. If you can, find out which ATS your potential employer uses.
One page or two?
Ideally, your resume should fit onto one page. Having a multi-page resume might seem like a great way to emphasize a large amount of experience, but in reality, it just means that your resume will not be read in its entirety. Hiring managers spend an average of just six seconds reading each individual resume.
In fact, there are hiring managers out there who will deliberately pass over resumes with more than one page. Your resume’s content should be focused on quality, not quantity.
Clutter, graphics, and other unnecessary features can also detract from your resume’s important details. Keep it simple.
Which sections should I include?
Do you include an education section? What skills should you list, and what order should the sections be in?
The answers come down to the type of job you’re going for and the type of experience you have. Always write to your audience, and consider what the reader needs to know in order to choose you for an interview.
An IT position doesn’t require training in culinary arts. When choosing skills to include on your resume, focus only on the skills that pertain to the job you’re seeking. Not sure you’ve covered the right skills? Run your resume through Jobscan’s resume analysis tool to see what you might be missing.
For many fields, your college major isn’t as important as the fact that you have a bachelor’s degree. If you have completed a degree, you should include it simply because it’s so often required of today’s job seekers. Incomplete degrees or unrelated advanced degrees should be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Chronological
The most common method involves listing previous employment in reverse chronological order. Each job has its own space with relevant details often presented in a bullet-point format.
Pros
Demonstrates consistent employment.
Offers insight into upward career trajectory.
Enables writer to detail accomplishments and roles.
Cons
Makes gaps in employment more apparent.
Takes up space, especially later in a career.
Emphasizes employment history and titles over skills.
One rule of thumb is to limit the experience you list to jobs related to the field you’re applying in. If you are applying for a job as a software developer, listing your first job as a dishwasher isn’t necessary.
And if you have decades of experience, consider listing only your most recent 10 years of work in detail, followed by a section called “Prior Professional Experience” that includes only your previous employers, job titles, and dates of employment.
Functional
A functional resume format focuses more on what you can do than what you have done. Your skills take center stage, and your chronological employment history—while still present—takes a back seat.
This is a great resume format for people who are changing careers, just starting out, or who have gaps in their work history.
Pros
Great format for positions that are skill-based.
Hides gaps in work history by making them less apparent.
Cons
Many hiring managers see this format as a deliberate effort to obscure a candidate’s work history.
A functional format can be incorporated into a hybrid resume, where work experience is still listed chronologically, but skills are emphasized over your employer, dates of employment, and job titles.
Hemalda’s Answer
Hi
Hiring managers and recruiters alike say they've seen more poorly written resumes cross their desks recently than ever before. Attract more interview offers and ensure your resume doesn't eliminate you from consideration by following these six key tips:
- Format Your Resume Wisely "Do the Hiring Managers" Work for Them
No matter how well written, your resume won't get a thorough reading the first time through. Generally a resume gets scanned for 25 seconds. Scanning is more difficult if it is hard to read, poorly organized or exceeds two pages.
Use a logical format and wide margins, clean type and clear headings
Selectively apply bold and italic typeface that help guide the reader's eye
Use bullets to call attention to important points (i.e. accomplishments)
- Identify Accomplishments not Just Job Descriptions
Hiring managers, especially in technical fields like engineering, seek candidates that can help them solve a problem or satisfy a need within their company. Consequently, you can't be a solution to their problems without stating how you solved similar problems in other companies and situations.
Focus on what you did in the job, NOT what your job was there's a difference
Include a one or two top line job description first, then list your accomplishments
For each point ask yourself, What was the benefit of having done what I did?
Accomplishments should be unique to you, not just a list of what someone else did
Avoid using the generic descriptions of the jobs you originally applied for or held
- Quantify Your Accomplishments
Q: What's the most common resume mistake?
A: Making too many general claims and using too much industry jargon that does not market the candidate. A resume is a marketing document designed to sell your skills and strengths rather than just portray a bio of the candidate.
Include and highlight specific achievements that present a comprehensive picture of your marketability
Quantify your achievements to ensure greater confidence in the hiring manager and thereby generate interest percentages, dollars, number of employees, etc.
Work backwards to quantify your accomplishments by asking, If I had not done X, what could have happened?
- Cater Your Resume for the Industry
Unlike advertising and design professionals who have greater creative license in designing their resume for those fields, the mechanical engineering industry won't be impressed and may be turned off by distinctive resume design.
Err on the side of being conservative stylistically
Your accomplishments, error-free writing, grammatically-correct, clean, crisp type and paper will make the impression for you
- Replace your Objective" with a "Career Summary"
A Career Summary is designed to give a brief overview of who you are and what you do. Most Objectives sound similar: Seeking a challenging, interesting position in X where I can use my skills of X, Y, and Z to contribute to the bottom line. Not telling at all.
Grab a hiring manager's attention right from the beginning, remembering you
have only 25 few seconds to make a good impression
Spend time developing a summary that immediately gets their attention, and accurately and powerfully describes you as a solution to their problems
- Network. Network. Network.
For unemployed candidates, handing out resumes should be a full-time job. The majority of mid- to senior-level positions are filled through networking, so contact absolutely everyone you know in addition to recruiters who are in a position to hire you or share insights. Networking can include
Personal business contacts, people you've worked for or who worked for you
Vendors and sales representatives you've dealt with in the past five years
People listed in the alumni directory of your alma mater
With a solid resume in hand you'll greatly increase your odds of earning a closer look and getting that interview.
https://resumegenius.com/resume-templates/basic-templates#classic-resume-templates