February 23, 2012

• Preparing your resume – Tips and Advice

  I’ve received about about 10 resumes this weekend from a bunch of people—whether it’s their own, or someone they know who might be interested in the job that was posted by another friend. While I didn’t really expect people right out of college to have great looking resumes, I was surprised by the look of these resumes from people who have at least 1-3 years worth of work experience. So I decided to post this as a reference for anyone who is looking to improve their resume.

  I wouldn’t call myself a pro at this, but after reviewing so many resumes in the past couple of years, there are many mistakes that are repeated.

  In no particular order of importance-

  A. Spelling/grammatical mistakes. As obvious as this may sound, you’d be surprised how many people submit their resume without proofreading.  As soon as you are drafting your resume, you should proofread your resume and then have at least two other people proofread it before you submit it for anything. If you assume that someone is hooking you up with a job, they are then assuming that whatever you provide them is the end product of your resume. If there are spelling and/or grammatical mistakes in there, they would automatically think that you are either careless or didn’t put in the effort. If your friend thinks that, what do you think HR or Hiring Manager would think?
  
  B. Aesthetically pleasing. It’s important that before reading anything, your resume is formatted properly and that there’s not a disproportionate amount of white space (lots of white space on the left, but none on the right or lots of white space at the bottom, but not balanced from the top). I have seen many resumes where there are words on it, but it looks empty. I’ve seen resumes where the formats are not consistent and the spacing is weird. It cannot look like you spent 2 hours working on it. It’s a reflection of who you are as a candidate.

  1. Use a unique template. About 90% of the resumes I normally receive, come from one of the Microsoft Word resume templates. This is NOT acceptable. Whoever designed the MS Word resume template probably never had a nice looking resume because not only are the fonts and spacing really generic, it’s straight up ugly. There’s also a crazy amount of white space that causes the resume to look empty. Plus if 90% of the resumes are like that, chances are, a large % of resumes HR receive are like that as well. You’re not standing out by doing what everyone else is doing. Browse the internet and find other people’s resumes.  Ask your friends to look at theirs and see if you can use their format.

  C. Education does not come first. If you have been out of school already and have at least 1 year worth of work experience, do not put Education above Work Experience. A resume should be looked at top to bottom. Your education plays second to your work experience. Emphasize that first.
  
  D. Do not put your GPA unless it’s an A- (or above). If you think anything between a 3.0 and a 3.5 is considered a “high GPA,” just think about it in terms of letters. If you changed it to a letter grade, it would be something along the lines of a B+. Do you really want to say that you’re only a B+ student?
  
  E. Bullet points should be responsibilities and impact. Virtually every resume I received has a long list of responsibilities. That’s not what a resume is, a list of things you do. First of all, there should be no more than 5-6 different things. If it’s more than six, then choose the 5-6 most important things you do and put those on. You want to tell the person reading it, what exactly you do and what kind of impact do you have with that responsibility. Provide examples of those “achievements” you have.  The format should always be something along the lines of [a responsibility] + [impact or affect of your work].
  
  F. Keep it one page. Rule of thumb is that if you don’t have about 10 years of work experience, you shouldn’t have two pages. Most people are interested in only your current jobs and what you do. I rarely get asked about my time right out of college. It’s just not that important. 
  
  G. Tailor resume to fit job description. Read the job description carefully and see how you can incorporate your experiences to fit the need of the person hiring. For example, many of the resumes submitted did not demonstrate finance or accounting experience. If you do in fact have some, at least highlight/illustrate that in your resume. If someone has to search your resume to see how it applies to what they’re looking for, it’s going to raise some red flags.

  H.  Use a decent email address.  As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, there is definitely email address bias.  There are people who look down on “hotmail” or “yahoo” email addresses.  But more importantly, try to use a professional email address like yourname@email.com.  ”AznCutie@gmail.com” for example should NOT be used.

  Anything else I missed?

  • 10:09 am
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