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PREPARING A RESUME’
Preparing Your Resume’
Graduating from college is a big event, but only the beginning in finding that perfect
job. Having a professional looking resume’ to give to a prospective employer is
always a good idea, and most often a necessity. A resume’ accomplishes two primary
objectives. First, it provides a summary of your background, to allow a prospective
employer to quickly compare your qualifications to other candidates. Second, it
provides an employer with a first impression of your ability to accomplish an objective
in a professional and well-
1. Consider the following “basics” of resume’ presentation.
a. Always use white paper with black ink, and try to use a high quality paper. Colorful or unusual papers or inks may make your resume’ stand out, but not favorably.
b. Always triple check your resume’ for spelling and grammatical errors. Also, have other people check the resume’. If you have spelling or grammatical errors on your resume’, your chance of being considered further for a job is severely diminished.
c. Use a simple layout for your resume’. Fancy fonts, fancy bullet points, etc. often do not look very professional. In addition, many jobs require you to paste your resume’ into their web site for consideration. Fancy formatting usually gets disorganized when pasting, resulting in a jumbled resume’ presentation.
d. Many different types of formats and templates can be found on the Internet for you to consider. There are also resume’ templates included in Microsoft Word and other word processing programs and software. Your career guidance office at college will also have examples of well prepared resumes’.
2. When preparing the content of your resume consider the following:
a. Unless you have a considerable amount of experience (and most new college graduates have only limited work experience), limit your resume’ to one page. As a rule of thumb, most people under thirty years of age do not have enough experience to use more than one page. Remember, the employer wants a quick look at your qualifications versus many other candidates. If the employer has to pour through two or more pages to find out what you can offer, they may just move on to the next resume’.
b. Always put your name and contact information (usually home address, telephone and/or cell phone number and email address) on the top of your resume’, in the center.
c. Consider starting your resume’ with a brief (two to three sentences) summary of your qualifications and perhaps job objective. But if you do include your job objective, be careful not to make it too narrow in order not to eliminate you from consideration for potential positions. You may also choose to change this summary of qualifications and job objective to tailor it to the position you are applying for at the moment.
d. Next, if you do have meaningful work experience, list your work experience in chronological order starting with your most recent job (or present job if employed). List your title or job position, the name of the employer and the dates of employment (usually only in years). If you do not want to disclose your present employer, consider just giving a description (such as “textile manufacturer”). Also provide a few sentences or simple bullet points describing what your position entailed and contributions you made.
e. Next, list your educational experience in chronological order, with your latest degree listed first. List the school, dates you either attended or graduated and the degree or diploma earned, if any. No need for any other description, unless you received a very significant award, or had another major accomplishment. Employers do not care about any education below high school education, and usually do not care about high school education if you have a college degree. Make sure not to forget to include any trade school or other educational programs you may have attended.
f. At this point in the employment process, employers usually do not care to consider any other information about a potential candidate. But if you have other exceptional accomplishments you may want to list them at the end of the resume’.
g. Always be totally truthful and completely accurate with all information on your resume’. Any discrepancies will usually result in either rejection or dismissal.
h. And finally, some people actually set up an online business resume with contact information, see Tom Mower as an example, to be found by perspective employers.