“Could you take a quick look at my resume and tell me what you think?” I've heard the question more times than I can count, and as a professional career coach and resume writer, my opinion can often be harsh and repetitive. They say familiarity breeds contempt, and so I temper my feedback accordingly. The average job-seeker doesn't know which parts of his resume are tired and over-used, which parts are transparent attempts to mislead, and which parts are just plain bad. One of the primary reasons people spend so much time and effort in writing a resume is that it’s the one activity within the whole job search process they can directly control. So, instead of just picking up the phone and calling a prospective employer to ask for a face-to-face interview (which risks potential rejection), they sit and obsess over their resume. They poke, and primp, and change fonts. But here’s the hard truth: The resume is your very first step in the process, and while it deserves your best work and utmost attention, it's only going to get you an interview. Jobs are not won at the resume stage, and any time your expectations go beyond landing a recruiter call, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Still, it's pretty hard to nail an interview that doesn't exist, and so there are some rough guidelines you can follow to give you a better sense of what's both expected and preferred in a modern resume. This is from the perspective of someone who owns a resume writing company that collectively writes thousands of resumes a year, which is worth mentioning, because most of the resume advice being passed around is simply written by professional blog writers doing minimal research, or one guy who spent 2 years recruiting. I'd rather give you my best suggestions here and let you turn these into a better version of your resume.
So here are the easy guidelines to help you re-shape your current document into the kind of thing a recruiter wants to see.
- Preferably no more than one page, but two is acceptable for 8+ years of experience in multiple roles, or especially with highly technical folks. Your goal should be to attempt a one page resume, and extend if you genuinely feel like you can't tell enough of a story to get an interview. That's the kicker, remember? You aren't telling the whole story, just enough of the highlights to convince that recruiter you're worth a phone call or some face time.
- Even in technical roles, most of your experience should be comprehensible by a recruiter (avoid talking over their heads if you actually want to get in the door to impress the hiring manager)
- Don’t get too creative with your design, layout, and other visuals. A classic style is classic for a reason. Recruiters aren't interested in pretty resumes. They want something easy to digest, so make it readable, stick with classic sections and styles that have worked for years, and focus on the content, not the style.
- Stick to a PC/Windows or universal font, 10-12 point size and black or charcoal color. No graphics. No icons. Resist the urge to impress people with anything but your experience and credentials. You're making progress!
- Go easy on boldface type, italics, and underlining. If you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing!
- Prepare it in a simple Word format that can easily be viewed on most computers, or a PDF if you want the format to stay locked and clean.
- Use reverse-chronological order. List your present, or most recent job first, and then work backwards. Try to list the last 10 or so years, and if the resume starts to feel long, you should only list 1 bullet per job with the older entries. At that point, you're just filling out the timeline and accounting for your career path. It's unlikely someone's going to hire you because of something you did back in 2002.
- State the complete name of the company, your location (not the company location) and the dates you were employed – You can often list your employment period using only the years, omitting the specific months.
- List the position you held and your accomplishments. Use quantitative data when it actually makes sense to do so, use qualitative data when that paints a better picture. Use specific stories and projects and try to talk about times you made the company better, saved money, or otherwise performed above and beyond your duty. Please don't list your day to day responsibilities with nothing extra. That's an easy way to make you look like a simply adequate candidate. It'll never make you the frontrunner.
- Begin with verbs, i.e. “Managed company tax reporting, finance, invoicing, purchasing.” For your current position, use present tense verbs as follows: manage the end-to-end process, oversee large-scale deployments, write great resumes. And in present tense jobs where you're talking about an accomplishment that had a clear end date, it's acceptable to use past tense. That's right, a present-tense job may have some past tense verbs if you're talking about something that isn't ongoing.
- A well-written summary is a powerful introduction to a resume. It primes the reader on a few key tenets before diving into your positions. It’s not an objective statement, just a 3-4-line narrative summary (written in third person, with no personal pronouns) of who you are and what you bring to the table.
- Skip personal information, i.e. married with three kids. It might sound stable to you but to a hiring manager looking for someone who can travel, it might keep you from gaining an interview. And since it’s often illegal for employers to consider that kind of information in a candidate, your resume could be thrown out for simply introducing potentially biased information.
- Recruiters and hiring managers love numbers. Give them any sort of quantitative data – statistics, percentages, or dollar amounts to show business impact and comfort zone. People like to see what kind of numbers you're comfortable with, and they use numbers as a frame of reference.
- Avoid vague or over-used keywords, jargon and phrases. These include “customer-oriented,” “excellent communication skills,” "highly motivated", and “creative.” All of these words lack substantial or concrete meaning and do absolutely nothing to help you secure an interview.
- Use industry-standard titles. If your employer has a strange title like ‘Senior Marketing Advisor II” and that’s not clear to recruiters, you have the creative license to change this to the most appropriate and widely understood title, for example “Sr. Marketing Manager, Lead Generation”. If you're being honest and not trying to give yourself a stealthy promotion, this is a completely acceptable practice. And they won't think it's odd if the official application for employment/background check is slightly different. I don't blame you for worrying about these kinds of things, but I can put those fears to rest. Give us titles we can understand.
- Photos shouldn’t be included in any resume in the United States (some other countries have a different policy). Including your photo on a resume actually opens a company up to potentially discriminating your application based on appearance. Because of this, most companies will specifically toss out your resume if it includes a picture, since nobody wants to be accused of hiring (or not hiring) you based on your appearance.
Here’s another hard truth. People misunderstand who is reading their resume and over-estimate how much time is spent reviewing it. Most organized companies have an HR department with at least one recruiter whose job is to identify potential talent and fill an interview pool of 5-10 candidates to present to the hiring manager. And since those 5-10 people come from hundreds of resumes (thousands if your name is Google!), that means they’re skimming resumes for roughly 6 seconds each until something interesting catches their eye. The hiring manager is actually much less concerned with the resume than you might think. He’ll look it over, but his job is to trust the recruiter’s selection of the applicant pool, then make decisions about those applicants in the interview. Let’s make it clear: The resume must impress the recruiter first and foremost. That is your target. The interview is where you impress the hiring manager. Approaching your resume from this perspective with this information might drastically change the way your resume looks.One final hard truth. Don’t be bashful. You have to have some guts and be willing to take the risk of picking up the phone and having someone say no. Getting interviews is hard work. It requires tenacity, persistence, determination, and courage to push yourself upon people – even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. No one likes being rejected, but applying for jobs is a numbers game. You prepare the right documents, adopt the best behaviors, then you apply and apply until your options start surfacing. Plenty of people will offer you the easy way out: Posting your resume on a job board in hopes that awesome jobs start contacting you daily with great salaries. We both know that’s a little too good to be true. Third party recruiters/headhunters often mean well, but they may only help you until they lose confidence in you. And while all avenues are worth exploring, finding a job will usually require effort, and there’s a reason people still do it “the hard way.” It works.