10 Eternal Truths of Resumes
These resume tips will not go out of style.
By Justin Oblinger
Regardless of what’s in style, you should always have a resume that accomplishes certain things which I consider to be eternal truths.
Now repeat after me: “My winning resume…”
1. Helps someone evaluate you. Yes, you are being evaluated. If you are shy about selling yourself, lock that fraidy-cat voice in your head up somewhere and don’t let him or her out until you have worked on a great marketable resume.
2. Has one main purpose – to get a recruiter or manager to call you back. You need to get someone on the hiring end to look at your resume and say “wow.” A good test of this is to show someone in your circle of family or friends who has not seen your resume before. If the reaction is “nice,” with eyes bugging-out, you are on the right track. Look to see if they are obviously impressed based on your family member’s body language. The resume has secondary purposes as well. You can also use it during the interview as a script to help you. This is also another good reason to write your own resume.
3. Must meet the format-test. Styles can go in and out of fashion, but punctuation errors, typos, misspellings, wordiness, and misused words are never in style. Simple formatting mistakes can mean no call backs. More egregious errors can imply you are sloppy in your work and short-circuit your otherwise qualified application from continuing on through the process. Don’t kid yourself in thinking one or two errors may not be a big deal to someone. Keep in mind that a qualified resume may pass through 6 or 7 people, each of them with their own inherent biases when it comes to formatting and grammar. The formatted document should also not look too crammed or have too much empty space. Some people have asked me about the right number of pages. This is one area where you will definitely get conflicting advice, and for some professions 3 pages might be appropriate, but whenever you can, try to keep your resume to no more than 2 pages max. I’ve heard of horror stories of executives tearing up someone’s resume because it contained 3 pages. If you can keep it to two pages or less, you are probably heading in the right direction.
4. Contains work history, results-oriented accomplishments (what you have done) and your top strengths (how you get those awesome results). You can get any number of books on how to organize your resume. Some experts will advocate emphasizing job history, or skills and education. Others advice-givers will say that you should use functional resumes, where you talk more about the role you perform. Rather than try to advocate for one style versus another, just make sure you have the core ingredients – work history, results/accomplishments and your strengths. These are the baseball statistics you want someone looking at when they are evaluating you for the big leagues.
5. Will survive a 5 second glance. A job posted on a public website, could see as many as 80-100 applications in normal economic times. This number might go as high as 150-200 when times are tough and a lot of people are out of work. Unless the recruiter has some good automation and analysis tools (most don’t) and they know how to use them (most don’t), he or she will have to plow through those 100 resumes very quickly (because they have 50 or 100 other jobs they need to fill besides the one you applied to). In order to efficiently make it through the recruiter’s rapid eye movements, your resume will need to pass the 5 second glance. That’s about the max amount of time you get. Technically speaking, it means only about the top half of your first page. This part of your resume should be as close as you can possibly get to awesome. If that first half of your page looks good, then the recruiter may linger a little longer and see other goodies your resume might have.
6. Does not disclose oddly personal items (like marriage, religious affiliation, some hobbies, race or age). You may want to convey certain things because you believe it will help your chances for getting hired, but things that are generally not discussed in the workplace (politics, religion, and sex), generally should stay off your resume. In most cases you don’t know who is looking at your resume and what biases they might have about anything, so best to just keep it professional. In some cases (such as applications for a non-profit or religious organization), it may be perfectly acceptable to state some of these items. In these specialty circumstances, use the job posting as a guide on what to write.
7. Is written past-tense, and with action-verbs. The most common and enduring format recommended by resume experts is to use action-verbs at the start of your descriptions and put them in the past tense. For example:
Spearheaded Led Managed Executed Designed Created
Also use action-verbs to avoid a passive sentence construction. Passive sentences can be easily spotted because they are not clear about who the doer was within the accomplishment you are writing about. You own these accomplishments – take credit for them. It’s okay. It’s your resume. It’s a good thing.
8. Will be sent through multiple channels. In other words even though you may have created the most fantastic resume ever written, it can still get lost, deleted, and screened-out. An online text resume, submitted for a job application might not ever be seen by human eyes. Your resume might come at slightly the wrong time, and get quickly deleted because the recruiter or the manager wasn’t quite ready to receive it (this is particularly true when applying for jobs that are always open – they are not always open positions, but because there is a need to fill a pipeline of replacements frequently, the leave certain job postings up permanently). Even though your resume doesn’t make it to the pair of eyes you wanted it to, that doesn’t mean there isn’t another way to get it there. A resume sent through an online job application tool may never see the light of day for one reason or another. But your resume sent to the hiring manager’s e-mail address with a good cover letter stands a much better chance of getting a look. If your email and attached document come across as a solution for this person, and are presented in a polished and professional way, you may even get a response from the receiver before the recruiter officially contacts you. Whenever possible try to push your credentials through multiple channels. It won’t hurt anything, and will improve your chances that your resume will get a look. A friend you know who works at the company, the receptionist or even the recruiter may cough up the manager’s email address if you ask.
9. Is most effective when combined with a cover letter. I have already said you want the resume to come across as a marketing brochure about you, but in the end, no matter how appealing and interesting you make it, it still cannot achieve what a cover letter can achieve – a conversation. The cover letter functions much like a customer testimonial does for a business – it should tell the reader, “hey, come check me out.” You want to always use the cover letter and resume in conjunction with each other. Like two siblings, you are going to take both of them on the trip with you. As far as what to say in the cover letter, you will basically want the following: That you have one or two skills that will make a dramatic difference for the target employer. The skills you choose should really be strengths for you, but personalize them in a way that the reader can see the benefit for them. When I write my cover letter, I always read through the bullet points at the bottom of the job posting, as this often conveys more than just a generic role outline (which is at top of the posting) and has real information about the specific job I am looking to get hired to do. If one of these bullets says “previous experience supporting IT and engineering clients a plus,” then I will outline a past experience that fits the situation being described. The cover letter should also contain an underlying element that will give the reader a real reason to believe in you. This is usually expressed in your degree(s), certifications, or work experience. You will want to convey that this job will get done with you in the role, and you have (education, work experience, or certifications to prove it).
10. Is something you like. If you made some radical alterations, based on advice from your friends, family, colleagues or even from a professional (like me) and you don’t like your resume, then stop. You need to like this document; I mean really like it. If you don’t like it, then why would a hiring manager? I listed this rule last because it may mean that you have to break the rules to get your credential to the state of grace you need it to be. Try to follow the counsel I’ve given you but don’t worry about the resume police coming to bang on your door. They don’t exist. If you try something and it works, keep doing it.
This work is copyrighted. 2009
