Sunday, April 18, 2010

Resume Tips From A Guy Who's Placed 1000 People

With this economy it’s not unusual for a single job post to attract hundreds if not thousands of resumes. How can you make yours stand out?

I look at a 100+ resumes a day. Every time I open a resume I hope that this will be the one. Here’s what inspires me to pick up the phone and give you a call.

Resume Dos
  • List your work experience first. For each position include the company name, location, and months and years worked.
  • Include a chart that lists your skills and the number of years of experience that you have with each skill. This helps me quickly access whether you have enough experience.
  • List relevant keywords for each position you held. I look for a correlation between your keywords (technical environment) and the work you actually did in each job. (This improves your standing with the resume parser too.)
  • Make your resume readable – consistent formatting (spacing, fonts and bolding) is very important. You may have the best skills in the world but if your resume isn’t readable you won’t make it past the resume screening stage.
Resume Don’ts
  • Don’t make me dig deeper than a page or two to figure out if you’re qualified.
  • Don’t have a five sentence career objective. Your objective should be 1 -2 sentences at the most. I’m looking for proof that you’re qualified and a lengthy objective just seems like filler.
  • Don’t fill the entire first page with a list of skills and keywords. I need to see your actual experience with each of those keywords.
  • Don’t have a half page long list of achievements and activities for each position. Please be concise and list only the points that are most relevant to the job you’re applying for.
The person reviewing your resume is in a hurry. Make it easy for them to figure out that you’re qualified. No one is impressed that a resume is 10 pages long. But I am very impressed when I’m able to figure out that you’re qualified within the first few pages.

Tim Collins

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