Fundamentals of Writing a Resume

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to impart the fundamentals of writing a good resume. There are books written on the subject with millions of examples etc. we will not get into that level of detail. We will instead try to focus in on the key aspects of a resume that get it noticed and get it to stand out from a stack of resumes. I have been a hiring manager for over 10 years and I have also spent time looking for work and have read some of those books mentioned above - so what you read here is practical advice that will help you.

A resume has one and only one purpose - to get you an interview - a resume does not get you a job - it gets you an interview.

Rule number one 

Your resume should (almost) never be more than 2 pages long - irrespective of how colorful a career/life you have had - you need to pick and choose the most valid contributions you made and the most exciting bits about your career and only include those in your resume. Think of a resume as a movie trailer - a very short teaser that makes you want to cough up $20 for a movie ticket and pay exorbitant sums of money for popcorn. Fortunately for you (and the person reading it as the case maybe) a resume only has to have actions (and results) - no romance and drama required.

Distilling a life and a career down to two pages is a very difficult task - but a task that focuses us and allows us to realize the really important contributions we have made and the things that we are most proud of - it helps us as individuals to recognize that which is our core skill - this realization is way more important that the task of creating a resume.

The more enlightened you are about your core skill set and the more you have set yourself apart in this one thing that you do more excellently the shorter your resume can be. I have seen resumes of very senior people that have been barely one page long. Think about what a resume for someone like Madonna might look like - or Richard Branson.

The Top Left Corner 

The top left corner of any page is the first place we as readers in the western world are used to turning our eyes - this makes it the most valuable real-estate of your resume. The most important information on your resume needs to go in this location.

The most important information on your resume is your name and your phone number. One can argue that the email address or mailing address is the most important way to contact you etc - this can I guess change based on culture, type of job etc - but generally whatever the most direct method of contacting you should be left most followed by the other information.

Your name should be in larger print than the rest of the print on the page - now how much larger this is beyond the scope of this article - it should look good - it should emphasize your name but it should not be a statement about your inadequacies.

Look and Feel 

Remember the metaphor of the movie-trailer the resume is an advertisement that is intended to entice a person to learn more about you. To invite you for an interview. It has to have as wide an appeal as possible because you do not know who will make this decision on allowing you to the next stage in the employment process. You do not know if it's a man a woman or even someone still discovering their sexual identity, really it doesn't matter - because you are going to market this to every-person.

So no pink paper - no blue paper - just use white. Today a lot of resumes are transmitted electronically and are received and printed on the cheapest recycled garbage that passes for paper in offices - now more than ever the content of the resume is what is important. However if you are handing in a hard copy - and you should always carry hard copies to an interview - make sure it is printed on good paper - something with a little more weight to it than the run of the mill copy paper. Your corner office supply mega-mall has aisles of choices - keep it good quality and simple.

I am no graphic artist - so if you are looking for nuances on what psychological impact Helvetica has over Times Roman or Georgia you are reading the wrong author. However I can tell you that you should use a simple font that will easily print on any computer - ie: something that ships with Word - fonts like Times Roman and Georgia will do just fine. Use a minimum of 11 point anything smaller and the "every-person" who might be over 40 might not be able to read it.

Use bold to highlight industry terms, or key products, but use them sparingly. Remember the point of bolding something is to make it pop-out - if everything around it is pop-out as well - there is no point. The use of color - I am not sure about - most offices still use black and white laser printers so at the risk of being a conformist corporate drone my recommendation would be to use black letters on white paper.

If you are handing out your resume vie email send it out in PDF format as well as Word. The PDF file allows the reader to see the resume as you intended it - while the Word file allows the recipient to manipulate it - including cutting and pasting into an internal database etc. Also make sure you check all meta-data in these files - ie: info such as Author (remember you thought it was funny when you installed Word and it asked for your name to enter Mickey Mouse? - well now the author of your resume is Mickey Mouse!), number of edits all this and more is stored in your document as meta data - another advantage PDF has over Word or other such apps.

Margins - in my opinion it is risky to go with anything less than a half an inch border all around - this is for technical reasons more so than aesthetic. Most printers cannot print to the very edge of the page. Also on practical terms you do not want the person to have to touch the print on the page - with some inkjet printers this could smudge the print. Best to try and leave a 1 inch border around the document if at all possible and then go down to a half inch if you really have to.

Using standard sized pages are also important - unless you are interviewing for a very artistic creative type of job - let’s print the resume on regular letter or A4 or whatever the norm is in your geographic location. When sending a resume to another country do the person the courtesy of reformatting your resume to fit their stand size - else they will get printer out of paper errors etc.

Content 

Ok so far we have covered the easy bits - the things you can easily control and change at your whim. Now comes the past the things you have done - the things that are difficult to change - even with some poetic license.

The cardinal rule when talking about your achievements - Talk about your achievements. In other words - do not lie; do not speak about your team/group's or your neighbors achievements. Focus on you and your contribution. Even more importantly what did your contribution result in?

What did you make happen? What would not have happened if you were not there? What made you worth the space you took up? What impact did you have in the places that you have worked? Then write a little about how you did it - just enough to convince the reader that you are not just making all this up.

Did you produce reports on a daily basis for 20 years? Well that may have been fun (in some parallel universe) but why did you do this? What was the purpose? What would not have happened if you did not do this? Who would have been upset if they came in every morning and your report was not on their desk or in their in-box? What did these reports enable?

Did the CEO or some senior big shot find your reports the must read with his morning coffee? Were they used to make some marvelous strategic decision that netted your previous company and its rich overlords many millions? Well this is what we need to mention in your resume. How your effort/contribution/ingenuity/pure brilliance resulted in something - hopefully something that would never have happened without you.

As a side note if you find yourself looking back and not finding anything that you impacted - the most likely reason is what you consider impact-full is not congruent with what you were able to impact - ie: your are looking for waves where there are only ripples. Look closer. Also take a note to question what you really want to do in the future - do you want to be making ripples for the rest of your life? - would you make waves in a different pond? - ie: would a change of context help you be the you that you wish to be?

The Order of Things 

There are many ways to organize a resume but there are two main formats - linear (as in time) and functional. Primarily this refers to how we organize the information we want to lay out in front of a prospective hiring manager. Do we wish to organize it by where we worked and what we did when? Or do we wish to organize it based on our core skill sets. For example you may have worked in Company A, B and C and you may have done some project management, office management and reporting. In a linear arrangement you would organize the information by company with the latest company first with the things that you did for that company under each company. In a functional resume you would have a heading called Project Management and list under it all the project management experiences you had and you may or may not mention the company where you had this experience. You would include a section lower down in your resume with the list of companies you worked for to show employment history.

A functional resume is invaluable specially if you are looking to switch careers or switch from one industry to another or one type of work to another - it allows a hiring manager to look beyond a particular job title or function to your core skill sets.

I believe in today's market you need both of these resumes and probably many versions of each - customized to highlight some portion of your experience to target particular job's that you may be applying to.

Final Words 

A resume is not you - it is at best a faint reflection of you. There are many dimensions to a person and their contributions to the world. A resume is a slice in time of one dimension of who you have been. It allows someone else - a stranger to you to decide in a fraction of time to give you the opportunity to convince them to allow you to work with them. It is written with a singular purpose - to get you an interview.

"An unexamined life is not worth living." -- Socrates

However if in writing a resume you have the good fortune to realize some things about yourself that you wish to change - this is fine. Change is not something that needs to happen for you to finish your resume – it is not a reason to postpone the creation of your resume or delay your job hunt - change, self assessment and more change are just a part of an enlightened life.