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Resumes. There's no one way to write a resume; there are many, many different opinions on
how to do this. People always ask, "Is this a good resume or is this a bad resume?" I
personally don't think resumes are good or bad; they are either effective or ineffective.
Does the resume effectively market the individual and what the individual has accomplished in
their career, education, work, whatever? So this is really the key: when a person begins
to write a resume they have to ask themselves what is it that they're applying for. In other
words, what type of job or career they're looking at. Because that might mandate which
way the resume is constructed; the one size fits all does not work. When you're starting
out to write a resume, you want to think about who the audience is, who will be reading this,
who will be looking at it, and what are they going to be most interested in. This is the
difficult part, because you want to see yourself in relation to the employer's needs, not necessarily
your needs at this time. So you want to look at, if I'm applying for this major in this
job, what do I have that meets or exceeds what the employer is looking for? Some of
the basics of a resume include, obviously, one's education, their degree, the level of
degree, their major, their minor, their GPA. We get the question all the time, "What is
the standard for listing the GPA on a resume?" Well, there is no standard. I know people
will say 3.0 and above and that's fine, but if you have a 2.7, 2.8, 2.9 GPA, I don't see
anything wrong with listing that on the document. If you have an Associate's Degree, you should
probably list that. Most important, it's the experience section that an employer is looking
for. For example, let's say that the individual has been in an internship over the summer,
previous to when they are graduating, and that internship is directly related to the
type of career he or she is applying to...then that should take prominence on the resume.
That could go under a heading of not just Experience, but Related Experience or Professional
Experience; it could even be something very targeted, like maybe it was in HR, it could
be Human Resources Experience. Now the key in this is, when you're writing about one's
experiences, you don't want it to sound like a job description, you want it to sound like
a testimonial of results. That's really what a resume is; it's not a life story, it's not
a biography, it's a profile of what you have accomplished as a professional person. You
want to think about, what did you accomplish on this job or internship. For example, if
you were involved in some sort of management—maybe you worked as an assistant manager somewhere—well,
how many people were in your jurisdiction, what were some of the things you did as a
manager? Were you doing scheduling? Were you doing timecards? Were you doing payroll? Were
you doing accounts receivable, accounts payable, logistics management? Any of that stuff. Employers
love numbers and if they see a lot of numbers on the resume, that will grab their attention.
So if you say, "Provided direct supervision for 25 full and part-time employees, including
sales reps and warehousemen," then they get an idea of what you've done rather than just
saying, "Supervised people." So you see, there's a big difference between just saying "supervised
people' and giving the reader a little bit more information to go on. This is the hardest
part of a resume to write, to give these quantitative types of results. Think of a simple formula
when you're doing this: action equals results. What action were you involved in and what
was the outcome? In other words, what was the result? If you can do this for every job,
it will be very, very easy to convey these accomplishments to a total stranger. There
are other experiences that you can put down that may not be directly related to your profession
of choice, but they're full of transferrable skills. For example, let's say that you worked
as a salesperson in a clothing store. Well, you know about customer service skills, you
know about sales and marketing techniques, you know about merchandising displays. And
what if you were there for a couple of summers or three summers? That shows longevity and
employers like that because it shows a credible work history, and that could always go under
Additional Experience. So you see we have Education, Related Experience, Additional
Experience. There are other main headings, such as Affiliations or Organizations, and
Memberships. Those are things like fraternities, sororities, and student organizations. Most
importantly, do you hold an executive board position? If you were the chapter president
of an organization, then have once again leadership skills and you have supervisory skills because
you have the well-being of 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 other people. So these are the transferable
skills, even from the student organizations, that can be marketed to a total stranger (i.e.
the employer). Other things are Honors, Activities, like intramurals, honors that are Dean's list
and scholarship awards; it looks nice. Community service looks like. There are other headings
such as research or project experience; those can be put on the resume depending on the
type of career field you're going into. Intercollegiate athletics looks very attractive, military
experience looks very attractive. So the question is, we're getting into a lot of headings...well,
how long is the document supposed to be? Many people will say students should have a 1-page
resume... Not necessarily so. If students are very involved and have a very credible
work history and have been maybe in the military or in sports, they might have 2 pages. The
trick here is, it should be 2 pages of relevant information. There's that word again: relevant.
How relevant is it to the reader? How relevant is it to the job or the employer you're applying
to? So keep that in mind. At the initial stage, do not worry about length. Think about the
content; does the content effectively market you? And that goes back to the bidding about
being an effective marketing tool. Try not to use a template; just go to a blank word
document and start there. Use fonts like Garamond, Times Roman, Arial, Perpetua; it should be
not smaller than maybe 10 point and larger than maybe 12 point; maybe the heading is
14 point. Make sure it's easy to read, easy on the eyes, so that employers can grasp it
quickly. Because an employer will only give the resume a 30 or 40 second scan, so keep
that in mind once again. We want to brief, yet thorough. So the trick here on a resume
is, we have to have it somewhere between a post-it note and a dissertation. So if you
keep that in mind, you will do very well with the resume. Once again, think about the relevance
to the reader, think about what you've accomplished. Does your accomplishments match with what
they reader is looking for? If they do, then you have to tell them. It's a question that
I always ask anybody when they come in about a resume. Do you want someone to guess at
what you can do, or do you want someone to know what you've accomplished? Every time,
people say "I want them to know." Well then you're going to have to tell them, but the
trick here is, somewhere between that post-it note and a dissertation. So keep this in mind
when you're starting this out, throw everything in on the paper; let's take a look at it and
then let's see where we can trim it to tailor it to the needs of you and the needs of the
employer.