Fill In Template
The contact information is at the top. Fill in
yours in the appropriate place. If you are a web designer, or your
website is professional enough to be displayed at work, list it.
Otherwise, do not. Don't ever give a recruiter or employer a reason
to screen you out.
The expertise
section is fairly generic - just take out the sections that are
underlined and insert your own similarly worded phrases. Make sure
to remove the underline formatting.
Qualifications
are bullet points that are haiku-like buzzwords meant to evoke you
overall. It's a good place to put in "evocative" key
words, like "team player", "business analyst",
"customer service"; even though these things are not
mentioned anywhere else in the resume or you haven't actually had
the title of business analyst yet (but you've had enough experience
to do the job).
Under
experience, just type in the company name (no location), your
functional title, and the year-to-year dates. You don't need to
provide much more in the way of detail until you are filling out the actual
job application once they have extended you an offer in writing.
The first two jobs listed can have 10 - 15 bullet points each -
remember that you are selling potential contribution to the company
- this is not a biography. It's a brochure. The other position
listings should be limited to 5 - 10 bullet points apiece. The
smaller it is, the more likely the recruiter or hiring manager will
read it all the way through. You only need to provide enough
information to get them interested enough in you to call you in for
an interview. If you list too much information, then why should they
interview you? It just seems to work against you, so don't do it.
The education and affiliations part should be
filled out as per the template and examples. It's really important
not to provide any clues as to age. Human resources people have
tables showing how much people should make according to their age
and experience. I'm sure you've had enough of being pigeonholed like
that. That's also why you don't list every single job you've ever
had. This is another good place to list courses (professional, not
college, that's the dead giveaway of a recent graduate) to bring
your resume up more frequently in the searches.
In the professional skills section, you need to
list every single technical skill and environment in which you have
ever worked. If you used a help desk package such as Remedy, then
you list the database on top of which it runs (Oracle), the querying
ability you obtained from it (SQL), the platform it ran on (Unix),
the platform you're working on (Windows NT or 2000), and every other
application that is on your desktop. I've heard recruiters complain
that these lists should be edited down, but having tried it, you
don't get nearly the hits (and CALLS) as before, so don't.
Recruiters will edit your resume into their specific format to
present to the client anyway. They're just fussing because they'll
have to work a little harder. Oh well. If they had better technical
skills themselves, maybe they wouldn't find it so difficult. (More on that later.)
There are always mistakes
Run spell check. Several times. Have a friend look over the
resume to catch any words that evade a checker but are used wrongly
(i.e. you resume instead of your resume). Put the document away for
a day or so, and then look at it from the bottom of the document to
the top, going backwards word-by-word. You'd be surprised what you
catch doing a check that way.
Proceed to Saving the Resume as
ASCII Text. |