A resume is essentially a self-advertisement and a marketing document that outlines your best skills while convincing employers to hire you. A good resume showcases your skills, experiences, and achievements, perfectly matching the requirements of the job you are seeking. Following our steps, this guide will provide three samples where you can base your resume. This guide will also walk you through setting up and laying out your content in a way that highlights your skills while capturing the reader’s attention.
There are several ways to create a resume. However, it is important to understand that it needs to be eye-catching and interesting to read. Your resume needs to be professional and polished since employers match your resume against their job openings to evaluate whether you would be a good fit. It is also important that your resume makes a good representation and excellent first impression of yourself. If done properly, you will surely manage to get a foot in the door. Here are some helpful tips to making a great resume:
1. Begin with a concise yet strong professional profile about yourself.
A great resume summary goes at the top of the page – positioned where it is most obvious to the eye. This is useful to attract a recruiters’ attention. This can be done by briefly summarizing your qualifications, experience, and education regarding the company’s needs and values.
Another tip to keep in mind is that an average recruiter will only spend 10 seconds looking at a resume. You should pay attention to the fact that a reader scanning a document will skip over large blocks of text. With that in mind, you should consider keeping your personal resume summary statement short and concise; around three sentences or fifty words.
2. The resume experience section is more than just a list.
When choosing experiences to list, pick those that seem most relevant to the position you seek. A good way to do this is by tailoring each of the bullet points to reflect the skills listed in the job description.
For entry level employees who do not have a lot of on-the-job experience, you should include all work experience opportunities you have had.
Jobs in distinct professional fields can often have a number of similar requirements. You should consider the skills you have already demonstrated that are applicable.
3. List your personal interests.
You should indicate skills or areas of knowledge related to the job. It shows that you are a well-rounded personality and allows for yourself to be someone that your future employers would want to know and work with. Personal interests are also used by the employer at the beginning of an interview to break the ice, as this creates common ground between the employer and you. However, elaborating too much on such topics and irrelevant interests or hobbies can also have unintended negative consequences in some situations. If in doubt, do not include a personal interests section.
4. The two (or more) pages resume is a hotly debated topic, but the bottom line is this – you want the information to be concise, and therefore keeping it to one page is always better.
If you truly have enough relevant and important experience, training and credentials to showcase on more than one page of your resume, then go for it. But if you can tell the same story in less space, do it.
Your resume is your way of personally advertising yourself and is the key to a successful job interview. Knowing how to make a good resume is the first step of any successful career path.
Therefore, please take the time to think about writing a good resume as well as tailoring it to the job description. If you can do that, you are well on your way to the next step – the interview. We hope that with these tips you will have a well-constructed resume to give to over 100+ companies at the Mega Job Fair and Business Expo on August 3rd.
By Edward Wang