Resume writing and career application best practices

Resume

Good Resume: What is included -- and not included in a good resume?

A resume is a modern job applicant's calling card. Before a prospective employee meets his or her prospective employer, the job seeker must make his or her qualifications, experience, and education seem clear and relevant on paper in the form of a resume. The prospective employer wants to know if the applicant can do the job under consideration. It is not in the job seeker's interest to merely underline that he or she is an interesting or intelligent person. The resume should identify past work accomplishments with the aim of showing the job seekers' value as an employee.

Thus, a resume should include the job seeker's education, experiences, past successes, and preferably quantify the results of the seeker's accomplishments by using percentages, dollar amounts, or time frames to prove in terms of concrete results that the prospective employee is qualified to the job. A resume should not include personal information such as the prospective employee's marital status, weight, appearance, race, or age, as the law prohibits employers from hiring or refuse to hire an employee based on such group memberships or identities.

Also, a resume should not include hobbies that are irrelevant to the job being sought, or even long past job experiences irrelevant to the job, such as occupations held in high school. A resume can be chronological, that is can contain a list of jobs in the order in which the applicant held the jobs from then until now, or it can be functional, highlighting the applicant's skills. Regardless, an employee wishing to get his or her foot in the door should remember when writing a resume that an employer is likely to spend only a few seconds glancing at the document. Unless the resume writer has a great deal of interesting experiences, he or she should try to confine the listed qualifications to a single, readable page, and know what to include and what to delete on this clear, readable, as well as functional document. Always ask, what will have an impact?