Are you staring at your blank screen with no idea how to begin writing your resume? It sounds like a case of resume phobia. Everyone goes through it at one point, whether applying for your first job at 16 or a corporate retail position many years later. Writing a one-page resume is indeed not an easy task per se. It is a bit stressful and time-consuming. Nonetheless, it should not be the reason you let your resume suck.
Think of your resume as the first impression an employer has of you. On average, a recruiter will take 7 seconds or less to review your resume. Well, that is if you pass the AI that is now widely used in the recruitment industry to help find the best-suited candidates based on keywords that match their desired qualifications. So let's ensure your resume gets you on the interview pile.
Draft out the skeleton.
Before even typing a word down on your paper, let's take a trip down memory lane. Of course, writing this resume will be based on your personal and professional experience. If you are a freshman in college, it is okay to have your high school senior year experience on your resume. Something is better than nothing. But best believe, come your sophomore year in college, you should not have anything related to high school on your resume. That is unless it was a passion project or starting your own business. Begin by writing down anything and all you have contributed to, whether a job, volunteering, or joining an organization, and note any leadership experiences, awards, languages, skills (technical and soft), scholarships received, etc. Once you have this, we can move on to utilizing your skeleton to write a decent resume.
It starts with the header.
Start with a single-spaced, one-page resume in Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri font. We can adjust the formatting later.
Then write out the following:
Line 1: Full Name
Line 2: Email Address | Linkedin URL | Phone Number | Portfolio, if available.
For both lines, ensure that you center them on the page.
3 major sections of a resume.
Those are Education, Work Experience, and Internship/Leadership Experience, and in that exact order. The other categories, like, skills, certificates, or awards, can serve as fillers for your 1-page resume. However, ensure they are located toward the bottom of the page after those three main sections are completed.
Education should always be the first section.
Place your degree and university on the left, and your expected graduation date and GPA on the right.
Position, location, and date range.
For every bullet point that you will write, ensure that you have your position title, location, and date range included. Look at the image below for reference.
The job description is your best friend.
As we begin to fill in the resume, tweak your vocabulary to match some keywords in the employer's job description, this is crucial. Some words that stand out to me here that I would include in the resume are improve, algorithms, collaboration, communication, scale, and solution. However, do not embellish the resume. Only put down what you are knowledgeable in.
Don't copy, paste, and submit the same resume for different positions.
It's an amateur mistake, but I promise that it is much more important to only use the relevant experience for the job you are applying for. Let's pretend I am applying for a position as a Data Science Engineer for Starbucks.
The following is my experience from college:
President of the coding club
CS Intern for Intel
Coding Intern for Starbucks
Student housing CA
Hosted a data science camp for high schoolers
Amazon warehouse employee
Technical skills: SQL, Excel, Microsft 360 suite, Python, HTML, Adobe Cloud Suite
Soft skills: Teamwork, time management, public speaking
Certificate and awards: Taco Bell Scholarship, Dean's Medal
In this case, I would use all the information that can apply to this job description and title of an engineer.
Again, put it together in the skeleton before moving onto the next step, which is filling in the body of the resume. The 3 highlighted sections in blue are crucial, the others can be used as fillers in case your resume does not meet the one page requirement.
Writing in the correct tense.
Past experiences stay written in the past tense. Current experiences will be written in the present tense.
Past: Utilized the Drupal 9 CMS to create, manage, and modify content daily on the school website...
Present: Develop an effective brand by utilizing storytelling skills to create a strong relationship with listeners...
A bullet point must always start with an action verb.
Try to use new verbs so that your resume is not repetitive. Coordinated, launched, transformed, analyzed, and created are some examples.
Use the STAR method to construct your sentences.
Situation–Context on job (section may not be needed)
Task–Problem you had to solve or a goal you worked towards
Action–Steps you took to complete a task or achieve a goal
Result–Explain how solving the problem or meeting goal contributed to success
Let's do an example together:
T – Rebrand the AdWorks image on social media
A – by portraying the mission and culture through the lens of current members
R – which encouraged a growth in content engagement and allowed AdWorks to share its story, build brand resonance with followers, and increase application rates by more than 50%
3 is the perfect amount of bullet points.
For every experience write down a bullet point following the TAR method, and choose the best ones to add to your resume. However, do not delete anything. Instead, keep a running list of tasks/positions that you can use for a different job on another document.
The Final Resume.
Put everything together, and you got your resume.
Tools and advice
Review your resume using tools like grammarly for spelling check and my new and FREE resume dropbox, where you can submit the resume and receive feedback for improvement. Remember that your resume will never be perfect or done per se. As you gain more experience add more bullet points and rearrange your resume to your liking.
Sincerely,
Your College Bestie
Yorumlar