Top 10 Resume Writing Tips
Tip #1: Tailor Your Resume to Each Position You’re Applying For
If you only follow one tip from this list, make it this one: your resume should be carefully tailored to the position you’re applying for.
Don’t view your resume as a document that you write once then forget about. Of course, you won’t be restarting from scratch every time – but you should make appropriate tweaks to highlight how exactly your past experience matches up the role you want to be considered for.
You’ll almost certainly find it helpful to …
Tip #2: Use the Job Advert to Guide You
Whatever job you’re applying for, there’ll be an advert detailing what the company is looking for. Use this to help you make it very clear that you have exactly what they need.
For instance, if the advert says they need someone “who’s adept with Microsoft Word”, you might include Microsoft Word in your core skills, or mention it in the description for one of the jobs you’ve had in the past. If they ask for someone with “experience managing a team”, you’ll want to make sure you emphasise this in your career history … even if it was only a relatively small part of one of your roles.
Tip #3: Present Information Chronologically
Although some people think that a “functional” CV can help show you in your best light, if you have an unconventional work history, this will lead employers to wonder what you’re hiding! As Allison Green puts it in “here’s the right way to format your resume” on Ask a Manager:
Normally, it makes sense for your most recent roles and achievements to take up the most space on your resume. You don’t need to go into lots of detail about a job that you had for six months ten years ago … it’s not likely to be very relevant to your employer.
The same goes for your educational qualifications: if you’ve graduated college, your high school classes and GPA are no longer very significant. You can include them briefly, but don’t spend half a page of your resume on them.
It’s not enough to say that you have “excellent time management skills” – it doesn’t mean anything, and it’s the sort of phrase that almost any candidate can use. Back up your claims with concrete examples. For instance, you could write:
Excellent time management skills: managed heavy workload in a busy department, prioritising and dealing with customer emails (frequently over 50/day).
Where possible, give figures: for instance, if you took on the task of writing newsletters to your company’s client base and this resulted in 10% more sales to customers on the newsletter list – say so!
One rather cringe-worthy trend with resumes is for stay-at-home parents (both moms and dads) to describe their time parenting in terms of a job. For instance, James Wilkinson from Advice from Super Dad writes that:
Now, I’ll be the first to say that being a stay at home parent is hard work – it’s a whole job and a half, at least. I’ve every respect for parents. But this sort of entry does not belong in your work history.
It looks silly, it makes you seem a little desperate for something to put on your resume … and it could also come across as quite insulting to a potential boss who may well have children of their own (and all of these duties to handle in addition to their job).
So what should you do?
The safest professional approach is to simply leave those years out of your work history: you can write a sentence in your cover letter to explain “from July 2011, I’ve been a stay at home parent”.
If you’re fresh out of school, you might think that bullet points look informal and odd. But in a business context, it’s completely normal to use bullet points to summarise information and to make it easy to take in.
You can find plenty of examples of resumes here on Live Career – this should give you an idea of how often bullet points are used!
Some key areas to include bullet points on your resume are:
· Your core skills (probably in a list with two or three columns, rather than a single long list that leaves a lot of white space on the right hand side of the page).
· Your duties for each of the previous job roles you’ve held
· Your educational history and qualifications
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This might seem like a strange tip, but it’s something that employers have increasingly mentioned as an issue – perhaps with the ease of taking and inserting digital photos.
You do not need to include your photo on your resume … however fantastic you look! Employers don’t (or shouldn’t) care what you look like, and it looks weird and unprofessional to put a photo of yourself on your resume.
(The main exception here is if you’re applying for a modelling or acting role, when of course it is appropriate to include a photo.)
You should avoid including any other images in your resume, too: for instance, don’t put in company logos from the places you’ve previously worked. You might think it looks slick, but it can cause problems with formatting, and it’s frankly a waste of your time. Stick to text alone.
This might seem like a tiny thing … but your email address matters. If you’re using
it’s not going to create the best impression.
A free email address is fine, but make sure it’s something sensible (probably involving your name, and perhaps a number if no version of your name is available).
Some people – and I’ll admit I’m one of them – feel that a Gmail address looks better than Hotmail or Yahoo, because Gmail users tend to be a little more tech-savvy. The name of your email provider, though, really isn’t likely to make a lot of difference.
There aren’t many situations in life when a typo can be ruinous … but sending out a resume is one of them.
While most people would forgive you a tiny typo, a resume with several typos, or significant typos (like a misspelled company name) will inevitably make you look bad.
Proofread your resume as carefully as you can – there are some great tips here on Daily Writing Tips that should help.
If possible, get a second pair of eyes on it too: ask a friend to look over it and make sure you’ve not made any mistakes.
This is also a good opportunity to make sure that you’ve been consistent with formatting (e.g. that all your headers are the same size, font and style), and that everything looks polished (e.g. that you don’t have a single paragraph running over the page break – if you do, insert a manual page break to neaten it up).