Resume Writing in Today's Job

Resume Writing in Today's Job Market You will spend hours creating and refining your resume for a job in today's market. You will make it the best it can be. And most potential employers will spend 30 seconds to one minute looking at it.

It may be because they have a stack of resumes on their desk; it may be because they can see right away that you are either under or over-qualified; it may be due to the fact that they see one word misspelled; or it may be because it is too long. It could be any of a dozen or so reasons, but the plain fact is, you do not want to eliminate yourself by making dumb mistakes on your resume. Follow a few simple guidelines.

Use plain white paper, and black type in an easy-to-read font. Make short, clear and complete "action" statements about your qualifications. Examples of action statements are: managed, initiated, created, developed, organized, etc. Don't ramble. Don't fluff it with adjectives. Don't state things about yourself that are not necessarily true. The most important criteria an employer will judge you by is your education, grade point, major, and history of success. Therefore, you must have a "platform" on which to stand, or no verbiage will make an employer interested.

The record has to be there to qualify you for the job you are requesting. If you create a resume that looks weak as far as experience, then you may be applying for the wrong job. If you see your resume as not quite powerful enough to support your request for a particular job, then certainly your potential supervisor or human resources person will see it the same way. The acronym "STAR" is a well-known way to organize the meat of the resume regarding tasks you have accomplished.

STAR relates to Situation, Task, Action, and Result. In other words, the name of the project, your role, what you did, and the result, in that order. Using this example not only organizes your thoughts on paper, but it also ensures that you are giving all the information an employer might want to see on your resume.

If you have accomplished some tasks that relate to numbers of people you supervised, or dollars saved, a percentage increase in performance or production you were responsible for, make sure that is spelled out clearly. The length of the resume is important too. If you are just graduated, then one page is sufficient. If you have some years experience with more to say, then you might stretch it to a page and a half.

But you must ensure that every sentence you use is needed and has content that helps your cause. If you stretch it to two pages, take your stack of resumes and pitch them in the trash because that's what will happen in your potential employer's office. Keep it brief. By all means, customize your cover letter and resume for the specific company and job you are applying. That is crucial. Rewrite your resume ten times if need be to make it fit the specific task and company at hand.

Sending a resume to "whom it may concern," may be necessary in some rare cases, but it is certainly not well-accepted. Get a name to send it to.