In these hard times, job applicants need all the help they can get. Whether you’re newly unemployed or someone looking to change jobs, your resume could be the factor that gets your foot in the door.
For 10 years I ran a resume business out of my house. It was never a full-time living, but it provided enough income to augment my (somewhat erratic) earnings as a free-lance editor. During those 10 years I met a lot of really interesting people who held an amazing variety of jobs. But one thing my clients had in common was this: they were like a person holding a bag of pearls and no idea how to string them into an attractive necklace.
So, in the hope that my knowledge will help fellow Kossacks who may be struggling with resume writing, I’d like to offer some ideas.
A resume is really an introduction that whets a potential employer’s appetite to learn more about you, your skills, and your background. It won’t get you a job, but it could get you an interview. Let’s find out how to write a resume that will land in the “A” pile.
Every resume reviewer has three piles of resumes—the “A” for “will definitely call,” the “B” pile for “maybe,” and the “C” pile, which is really not a pile at all—it’s round and sits beside the reviewer’s desk. Or at least, it did. Now it’s the reviewer’s e-mail “trash” folder.
Which format is best? That’s an interesting question. The answer rather depends on your circumstances. Has your career been a steady upward progression with ever-increasing responsibility, prestige, and pay? In that case the well-known chronological format is probably right for you.
Did you take a detour into a job unrelated to your specialty and feel the need to de-emphasize that fact? Then a modified chronological format would be good for you.
Do you want to transition from a series of low-level jobs to something with a better title and salary? A modified functional resume might be best. Employers are wary of strictly functional resumes, but a well-written “modified functional” resume with an employment chronology allays their suspicions that perhaps you’ve taken substantial time out of the job market.
Many applicants have been told to keep their resumes to one page. Uh—no. One page is all right if you’re transitioning from your first job after college to your second job. But if you’ve been working 10 years or longer, you’re going to need room to describe your skill sets and accomplishments. Most applicants need a page and a half to two pages, depending on their work background.
If you’re making $100,000 or more, you can have three pages. If you’re going for a job in the $400,000 a year bracket, your resume will be four to six pages long. Before anyone pays you that much they’ll want to know why you’re worth it, so you need that space to describe your accomplishments.
So let’s settle on a two-page resume. (If people would like more diaries in this vein, I’ll discuss a one-page cover letter, a one-page qualifications brief, and a two-page marketing letter.)
Now—how should your resume look on the page? Before we get to categories, let’s talk about visuals. Three points must be made right away: 1. There must be plenty of white space. 2. There must be clear evidence of organization. 3. The font used should be 12 points (if Times New Roman is used). Most reviewers are going to be older than 40 and their eyesight is deteriorating, so using a tiny font will not endear you to them.
Regarding fonts: a serif font like Times New Roman is going to be easier on the eye than a sans serif font like Arial or Helvetica. It’s perfectly okay to use a sans serif font for headings, though: I do it myself in the resumes I write.
Your name, address, mobile number, and e-mail address go on top of the resume, of course. I like to use a dividing line (a.k.a. a “rule”) under this header information to separate it from the rest of the resume.
The first category should be the objective. In the format I like best, this is flush left, upper and lower case, 11-point Arial.
Why do we need an objective? So the reviewer knows right away what kind of job you’re looking for. If it’s a big company that’s just advertised 14 open positions, naming the position right away is going to make a good impression. (Note: if you’re making $100,000 or more a year, you can do without an objective. In that situation, a headhunter may well be looking for you.)
An objective should state your desired position clearly and promise a benefit. Let’s consider the following objective:
“A position in accounting that will fully utilize my skills and knowledge and offer a path to advancement.”
No way! This objective is self-centered and offers no value to the potential employer. Here’s a better objective:
“To contribute to the efficiency of a company’s internal operations as a junior accountant”
You see? You’ve named your desired position and stated you want to increase the efficiency of the company’s internal operations. You’re promising a benefit.
The next category is the summary. Okay, I can hear you asking, why do I need this? It’s taking up valuable space!
You need a summary for the simple reason that many reviewers will toss or delete your resume if it doesn’t have one. The summary is four to seven lines of text that tell how many years of experience you’ve had, in which fields or industries that experience was acquired, your key skills, and a hint as to your greatest asset. That five-second look from a reviewer at your summary determines which pile your resume will go into—and we want it to be the “A” pile.
Here’s an example of a summary for a flight attendant supervisor position:
"Twenty-seven years of airline experience as flight attendant and international and domestic purser, and as inflight supervisor for DEF Airlines. Particular strengths include understanding of flight attendant responsibilities, developing flight attendant skills and training, and motivating and recognizing excellent performance. Use superior organizational, communications, and marketing skills within the domicile to help flight attendants achieve success in delivering a world-class product to DEF Airlines’ customers."
Right here is a good time to discuss whether your resume should be in bullet format or narrative format. Speaking as a resume writer with many years of experience, I can state that I’ve seen very few resumes in which bullets were used effectively. Bullets seem best for people in certain industries, whose accomplishments can be quantified easily—as in the following:
• Instituted policies that reduced absenteeism by 24 percent the first year, thereby increasing productivity 43 percent
• Launched initiative to reduce the amount of rework on the factory floor, resulting in cost savings of 37 percent in materials and labor over two years
As a resume writer, I’ve found that most people’s resumes are helped by the narrative format. It gives me, as the writer, more scope to highlight skills.
After the summary, what? Well, what is your greatest asset and how does it fit the job you’re applying for?
When I was running a resume-writing service out of my house, I used an “interview form” to extract the kind of information from my clients that I needed to show them off in the best possible light. Now I write resumes only for family and friends, most often working by e-mail or telephone. I send them my interview form to fill out and when they send it back, I start the first draft.
Your biggest asset is whatever you would use to persuade a potential employer to hire YOU rather than the 39 people sitting out there in the waiting room, who want the same job you’re applying for.
Is it the fact that you have a Harvard MBA and this is your first resume after grad school? Then the MBA would be your biggest asset, so you’d lead off with that after the summary. In other words, the categories against the left margin would read Objective, Summary, Education.
But what if your biggest asset is experience? Then the next category after Summary would be Experience.
What if you’re a real hotshot software developer who knows absolutely all the latest packages? Well, that would be your biggest asset, so your category after Summary would be Technical Qualifications.
Most people’s biggest assets would fall into these categories. However, if your biggest asset is the fact that you just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, then by all means—the next category after Summary would be Honors and Awards.
However, let’s suppose that you’re applying for a position as an office manager, and that your biggest asset is your experience in doing exactly this sort of work. You could hit the ground running—very little training would be necessary.
So under Experience, we would have a paragraph such as this: As Office Manager for a small company that supplied products and services for the real estate industry, managed daily operations in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. This involved supervising an administrative assistant, bookkeeper, and receptionist and overseeing the daily workload to ensure deadlines were met. Major achievements: (1) Reduced operating costs by switching to vendors with comparable quality for office supplies but lower prices. (2) Analyzed work traffic flow to reduce downtime and increase productivity, resulting in a 50 percent decrease in overtime pay for nonexempt office staff. (3) Earned promotion to Office Manager one year joining the company as an Administrative Assistant.
For each company listed under Experience, I indent five spaces, type the company’s name, and next to it or under it, the location—as in ABC Office Supply Co., New York, NY. Opposite the company name, flush with the right margin, I list the years worked, as in 2007–Present.
The best resumes I’ve ever seen offer a short word picture of either the type of business or the type of office environment where the experience was gained. For example:
ABC COMPANY, City, State 2002–Present
Energy marketing nationwide provider of energy products, including electricity and natural gas
And this:
As Marketing/Licensing Consultant (200X–200X) in the small licensing section of a mid-size company that serviced the insurance industry, managed and supported 26 client/partner relationships, totaling $X million in annual revenue.
I put the name of the position in italics in resumes that show a steady progression in responsibilities (and presumably, the salary that goes with those greater responsibilities.) However, if you want to transition from a series of low-level jobs to something better, then please avoid using job titles. You don’t want to use the title of Administrative Assistant if your job duties actually entailed responsibilities that actually deserved more pay and a better title. People think in stereotypes: never forget this fact. Once you’re stereotyped as an “admin,” you’re not going to get the pay and respect you deserve.
(Note: I am not disparaging administrative assistants, okay? I was one myself before I fought my way out of that field to one that offered a bit more respect and a bit more pay, and from there to a position that offered considerably more pay. But some of those “thinking in stereotypes” people see ALL women as “admin assistants,” so if you want a better title and all that goes with it, avoid using that label.)
In job-getting resumes, as opposed to “house” resumes that might be bid in a proposal to win a contract award, the usual narrative form is first person, with the “I” understood.
One of the most common and dreadful mistakes I’ve seen in resumes is that of mixing first and third person. Another common mistake is failing to use past tense when describing positions the applicant held in the past.
Your accomplishments are what sell you to a potential employer. That’s what my interview form is designed to ferret out—what exactly did you do to improve a process, speed up an operation, save the company money?
Salespeople bring money directly into the company. Highly qualified technical people design products that consumers and businesses want. The only way that other types of positions contribute to the bottom line are if the people who hold them increase operational efficiency or, in the case of an office manager, save money on vendors and office supplies. For example, I was once an editor who worked with several desktop publishers. Before I arrived on the scene, there was no formal style guide; each editor simply “guessed” how words should be rendered. I introduced the use of the Chicago Manual of Style and made sure that all the other people in the office knew about it and could refer to it. This increased the quality of the printed material that was our product.
In another example, the lead editor in that group followed the 19th-century practice of using a red pen to make editorial marks on hard copy. The same document would go back and forth, back and forth, between the editor and the desktop publisher. I was able to persuade the desktop publishers to let the editors edit online. This greatly reduced the number of production cycles as well as saving paper.
All of these efficiencies come under the sub-heading “Major achievements” in each Experience block of your resume. If you only have one major achievement for that job, you’d just write “Major achievement:” followed by a description of whatever it was. For more than one achievement, you write “Major achievements”, followed by a colon, and then (1) plus the descriptive sentence, (2) plus the descriptive sentence, and so on.
Now—what about your greatest liability? What’s the fact about you that you want to deemphasize? Was it the fact that you didn’t graduate from college or even go in the first place? Was it that you had to drop out of the job market to care for a sick relative? Was it the fact that you took off for Australia after high school instead of going directly to college? Almost everyone has something he or she would prefer to deemphasize.
Let’s take a common situation: you were laid off from your professional job, so to pay the rent you worked at a fast-food store. Now you want to get back into the professional world.
So on your resume, instead of using “Experience” as your category, you write “Highlights of Relevant Experience.” Then you start with your last professional job.
In this situation it would help if you could include a sentence in your Summary about recent experience in your field, like taking a course in new developments in that area, or doing volunteer work in that field for a nonprofit organization. You could also include a sentence in your Summary such as: “Currently employed in the commercial sector in a field unrelated to—(whatever your field is).”
Then, after you’ve listed all your professional experience, you have a category called “Other Experience.” You could write something like this: “Currently employed in the commercial sector as an associate for a national restaurant chain. In this capacity have learned customer service skills, knowledge of day-to-day operations, teamwork, and the importance of adherence to health and safety regulations. Major achievement: Named “Associate of the Month” six times in first 12 months of employment.”
In my own case, my greatest liability was the fact that I didn’t have a college degree, even though all the jobs I held (after I left the administrative field) required it. I simply “hooked” the prospective employer with my biggest asset, Experience, and put Education as the last category on page 2. I listed the university I had attended, the major, and several courses I took after that. It seemed to be enough. It also helped that when required to take an editing test I outperformed the other applicants.
Now you’re almost ready to wrap it up. If you’re a hardware or software person, you could add the category “Technical Qualifications.” If you simply want to show the prospective employer that you know your way around the Internet, you could add “Office Automation Skills” as a category, listing Microsoft Office, Linux, or whatever else you know.
Other categories, depending on your particular situation, could be as follows: Employment History (if you’ve used the functional format); Education; Continuing Education; Licenses and Certificates; Professional (or Community) Affiliations; Clearances; Additional Qualifications (you could list foreign languages here); Publications; Honors and Awards; and References.
Generally speaking, it’s a waste of space to list your hobbies. If they’re that interested in your spare-time activities, let them invite you for an interview!
I generally don’t use “References” as a resume category. I state in the cover letter that they’re available, and advise my clients to have a list of references ready to hand over (I call it Addendum Page 1). On the left, list the reference’s name, job title, company, and possibly the city and state: on the right, the telephone number and the e-mail address. At least three business references should be supplied.
Unless the advertisement requests that references accompany the resume and cover letter, I don’t advise including it. Just have a hard copy in your briefcase when you go for the interview in case they ask for it.
Same thing with a list of publications. Unless you’re applying for a professorship somewhere, a list of all your publications is going to take up too much room. I advise listing them all on a separate page (Addendum Page 2—and of course your name and e-mail address or telephone number goes up in the top left corner.)
So after all this, you’ve got a two-page resume. Then what? Use spell checker! It won’t catch everything, but it’ll do a lot. Then find a friend with editing skills to look it over to make sure there’s subject-verb agreement, no homonyms (did you write “they're” instead “there”?), no typos, and so forth. If you don’t have a friend or relative who can do this for you, there’s still something you can do: read it aloud. I mean, read every word aloud. You’ll be surprised at the mistakes you catch by doing this.
Okay, you’ve got your two-page resume, and it’s as good as you can make it. What’s next?
The cover letter, that’s what. But that’s a whole new diary.