Resume Writing Success
Posted: Friday, January 09, 2009
by Lesa Caskey
Brick Elm LLC
There are many ways to organize, write and layout a resume and unfortunately there are as many varying opinions as to which style is the best. While there isn't one sure-fire template to follow, there are definitely rules of thumb that will help you to get your message across quickly and effectively. A major debate about resumes is how long they should be and I have always advocated that it should be as long as is necessary to give readers a clear notion of your qualifications, skills and experience with 2-3 pages being the average.
- Readability is number one so make sure that the layout is spacious enough so that the section headings are easily identifiable and readable
- Use a font without "feet" such as Arial, Tunga, Veranda or Tahoma
- Using bulleted lists where possible in your position summaries will assure your readers that they will not have to invest a lot of time to identify your qualifications
- Single-space in each job summary and double-space between job summaries and section headings
- Position Qualifications Summary, Education, Training and Skills sections as the first sections to offer a snapshot to the reader right up front
For the body of your resume, be sure to include the name of your employers, dates of employment and titles of the positions you held for each job you list. Within each job summary should be a detailed description of what your responsibilities are/were. Make sure to speak objectively as opposed to referring to yourself in the first person, meaning that you will not refer to yourself as "I". Never write your resume in the first person because before you know it it's like writing a diary and the readers of your resume will quickly tire and move on to the next resume.
A good exercise is to write a job description for each job you are writing about. Create a list of responsibilities and objectives as you would to distribute to potential candidates for your old job and then simply make the grammatical changes to that list to make it past tense. This exercise assures that your summary will be objective.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)Lesa good tips but frankly in this day and age not much time to read the tons submitted. in my opinion it is best to get right down to the details.Robert,
I'm not sure what your comments are addressing. Are you referring to the article or the style of resume?
Thanks for reading! - LesaNo your article was good I was referring to style since many of us have stacks to read. Sorry i was not clear enough.
hi lesa,another well thought out, well written, and interesting articles with a lot of good suggestions for those looking to type up a meaningful resume. thanks for sharing,best regards,sue thom
Lesa,What a well-written article! Your information is succinct, to the point, and exactly what one needs to know to write a good resume.Great job!
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