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Resume Writing Tips – Your Resume Is The Key To Your Job Interview
Posted in: Blog by admin on October 14, 2010
Are you confident in your ability to ace your job interview? While that
may be crucial to locking up job offer, you’ll never get the job interview
if you don’t wow them with your resume first. So how do you wow them?
Writing your resume, while being the key to a successful job search, shouldn’t
fill you with dread. You don’t have to write the great American novel. You
don’t need to come up with some exciting and surprising plot twists. There
are definite resume writing tips and techniques you can use to make your
resume stand out in a large pile of other resumes.
You need to tailor your resume so that it highlights all the qualifications,
work experience and any education that you’ve had that best represents the type
of work you are applying for. You should also include any other work experience
that you’ve had, as well as any accomplishments that you have made in your field.
While you want your resume to be formatted properly, as well as look very professional,
it should stand out because of your qualifications and skills, not because it’s in
green calligraphy font on hot pink 11 x 14 inch paper.
Let’s take a look at some crucial resume writing tips you should know to improve your
resume. These are some of the things you need to avoid if you want your resume to
stand out in a positive way.
* Don’t leave out or try and bury crucial information that needs to be on your
resume.
* If you have major gaps in your work history, it’s best to address that right
up front. This is probably something you’ll want to include in your resume
cover letter. If you just list your work history and there’s a big gap of time
that you didn’t work, the employer is not going to call you and ask you about it.
There are plenty of other resumes to look it. Yours will go in the trash.
* If you have a summary, make it short and concise. Employers and recruiters
don’t want to read your life story.
* Use a standard and simple font like Times New Roman, or Courier. Like I mentioned
above, stay away from fancy fonts on your resume.
* Avoid writing your resume as a narrative. It should not be in the first or third
person. Your resume will sell you as being arrogant or egotistical. That’s not the
way to get a job interview.
* No pictures or graphics!! No! No! No! Your resume should be text only. Period.
* I know this one seems obvious but you’d be surprised at what gets put on a resume.
Do not lie on your resume. It will come back to haunt you. It may not be until well
after you get a job, but it will happen.
* Forget about the trivial stuff, like hobbies. It doesn’t help and it could hurt
your job search.
* Don’t use long paragraphs in your resume. Everything should be short and concise.
* Keep your resume length at two pages maximum. You don’t have to worry about fitting
your resume on one page but don’t go longer than two. Everything you need to convey on
your resume can be handled sufficiently in two pages.
* Spelling and grammar errors will kill you. Proofread and proofread again and then
get someone you trust to proofread it as well.
Avoiding these resume writing mistakes will go a long way toward writing a resume that
gets you a job interview.