8 Simple but Important Resume Tips

Resumes are essential to the job search, but unless you are a resume nerd like myself, it can be a daunting task. With so many conflicting pieces of advice, you might feel like you don’t know where to start or what to do. Save your time and energy and follow this outline for a resume that will wow recruiters and hopefully, land you the job of your dreams.

1. Design Matters: Don’t go overboard with intricately decorated templates. Look for sufficient white space, margins of at least .6 inches, and a font size for important information no smaller than 11 pt. I have been known to drop some less pertinent information on a resume; (i.e. dates of employment, city, state, location of past employment) down to a 10 font, but for an entire document, I do not recommend it.

Formatting is everything. Keeping it simple with fonts and reserving head shots and graphics for specific public, creative and entertainment services.

2. Be Reachable: Make it easy for recruiters to reach out to you by providing your contact info near the header. No need to be cryptic and consider getting a new email address that is professional and does not have any underscores in it. You would be surprised how many times, an underscore goes unnoticed because your email address is automatically underlined. Remove the underline if your email address is important to you so that it is clear and easy to read.

3. Show Off Your Skills: Don’t make recruiters hunt for the most critical information on your resume — consider including a table of your key soft and hard skill sets up top. Make sure your highlighted skills show why you’re a good fit for the job — all the better if these are keywords from the job description, but be careful not to simply regurgitate the tasks that they are looking for you to complete.

4. List Your Experience: This section should include each company you’ve worked for, your title, the dates you worked there, and several bullet points that describe your key accomplishments and responsibilities. There is a limit to this section and it should only take up about 40% of your one page resume. Sounds tough, but less is more. When a recruiter only takes 10 seconds to review a resume, a dense description under each job you have had will go mostly unnoticed. Also, consider the most recent jobs you have had. It is tough to fit everything onto one page if you list the paper route you had when you were 14 years old. Likewise, if you in a profession for 10+ years and have had at least one other job in that respective field, then it is not necessary to mention a minimum wage job, retail, restaurant or telemarketing job that you had that is completely irrelevant to your current job search. There may be an opportunity to use a job like these to highlight some of your soft skills like customer service, but there are ample opportunities for you to highlight your soft skills in other areas of your resume. Do not be afraid to include positions that are not directly related to the one you are applying for, especially if you have limited work experience. You can still use it to demonstrate the skills and qualities you want highlighted.

5. Quantify Your Experience: Whenever you can, use concrete data points — it helps provide recruiters with the scope and context of your work, and demonstrates how you contributed to the bottom line.

6. Get the Grade: Many jobs require degrees or certifications, so make sure to list yours. GPA is optional, but may be worth including if you’ve graduated recently with high marks.

7. The Extra Stuff: If you lack experience, consider adding some color to your resume with a short catch-all ‘Additional Experience’ section at the end. Include clubs/organizations, volunteer experience, awards you’ve won, and even interesting hobbies or activities. For those with a few years of experience, you should include a section on “professional development” or “active leadership” to highlight your desire to be a driving force in your respective field of interest.

8. Keep It Concise: Limit your resume to 1 page unless you are an executive with 20+ years of experience, or have many publications, speaking engagements or other multimedia resources worth mentioning. The resume may take on the look of a curriculum vitae, which is not what many recruiters really want to see.

If you need help with getting started or have a draft that needs to be looked over by a professional, let me know and I would be happy to assist you.

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