Writing your resume


What is a resume?


A resume is a one or two page summary of your education, skills, accomplishments, and experience. Your resume's purpose is to get your foot in the door. A resume does its job successfully if it does not exclude you from consideration.

To prepare a successful resume, you need to know how to review, summarize, and present your experiences and achievements on one or two pages. Outline your achievements briefly and concisely. Your resume is your ticket to an interview where you can sell yourself!

Write a resume that generates results


This award-winning guide to resume writing will teach you to write a resume equal to one done by a top-notch professional writer. It offers examples, format choices, help writing the objective, the summary and other sections, as well as samples of excellent resume writing.

Writing a great resume does not necessarily mean you should follow the rules you hear through the grapevine. It does not have to be one page or follow a specific resume format. Every resume is a one-of-a-kind marketing communication. It should be appropriate to your situation and do exactly what you want it to do.

Instead of a bunch of rules and tips, we are going to cut to the chase in this brief guide and offer you the most basic principles of writing a highly effective resume.

Writing your resume

Gather your information
Gather your information
Before starting the first draft of your resume you have to make a detailed list of all your experience, education, profile features and everything you might find suitable for your resume. In this section you will find a good way to make a selection of the information you have to include in your resume.
Resume Summary
Resume Summary
The summary of your resume is the first impression the recruiter will have of you, this part will determine if your resume is worth enough to keep reading it. In this section you will find some useful advice of what you can or can not consider to make your summary eye catching for anyone who read it.
Career profile
Career profile
In this part of your resume you have to highlight your skills and achievements, but do it on the right way. In order to make a profile that expresses what you really want to, you should review this section.
Experience
Experience
The way you place the information about your professional experience has to be very clear and understandable. There are ways to organize your information in order to make your resume look very professional, even if you don't have much experience.
Education
Education
Try not to include many unnecessary details about your education, make it concise and easy to read. In this section you will find advice about how to array your education in a good and clean way; you will also find tips of punctual things to avoid and formats for bulleting your data.
Quotes and other facts
Quotes and other facts
Quotes are no common in resumes but they can help you a lot, you have to know how to use them and in this section you will find it out. You can also add an 'other facts' section to your resume if applicable, this section can go at the end of your cv.
Mistakes to avoid
Mistakes to avoid
Writing a resume is not an easy job, it requires a considerable amount of time and concentration. In this section you will see which are the most common resume mistakes and how to avoid them. Remember that you should review your resume twice or more to find out some little mistakes.
Revising the resume
Revising the resume
Once you think your resume is done you should stop and review it one more time, if you think everything is ok, ask some friend to review it for you, he/she will probably find some mistake you didn't see. Look for someone that works in the same field of the job position you are applying for and ask for advice.
How to proofread
How to proofread
Proofreading is the final step before sending a resume to the recruiter. There are many aspects to take into account during the proofreading, here you will find very useful information about proofreading your resume.
Printing your resume
Printing your resume
Even though nowadays is more common to send your resume online, hard copy resumes are still in use. You can also use a hard copy of your resume for a job interview. We give you some advice for you to obtain the best results in your physical resume's quality and appearance.
Sending your resume
Sending your resume
Sending your resume has also some tricks that can help you or not. First, you have to know that email is not the only option you have to send your resume; you can still send it by traditional mail or by fax, if you do so you can increase your possibilities to get noticed.
Scannable resumes
Scannable resumes
Some recruiters receive a big number of resumes, so they decide to scan and place them into a database. If you want to succeed in this kind of evaluation you should highlight your keywords in order to appear in the results when the recruiter makes the research.
Keyword / ASCII resumes
Keyword / ASCII resumes
You can send your resume to a specific recruiter but you can also have it online, available for any other recruiter that may want to review it. To do this, is important to write your resume not only for people but also for the www robots. See how to do it here.
Cover letter strategies
Cover letter strategies
A cover letter, even it may not be used every time, is a very helpful document if you know how to write it. A cover letter sometimes is the only document recruiters have time to read, so make it right in order to get a job interview. Some cover letter tips here.