How to Improve Your Resume
The chances of getting an interview for a job opening can become much greater if a person takes time to make improvements to his/her resume. A well written resume is very important because your resume creates the first impression on a hiring manager and in most cases; first impression is also the last one. Fortunately, making improvements to a resume is not very difficult as you will need to know a few basic things only.
Instructions
-
1
Decide if you want to include an ‘Objectives’ section in the resume because some consider it necessary whereas others do not. If you decide in favor of an ‘Objectives’ sections, make sure it maps your skills and experiences to the employers needs.
-
2
Write a brief and concise ‘Skills’ section. This section of your resume would probably be overlooked by a hiring manager unless you are applying for a technical job. This is because hiring managers pay more attention to the bullet points of your resume’s ‘Experience’ section where they can read about your skills in context.
-
3
If you are applying for a job related to education or have very little or no work experience at all, type in the ‘Education’ section of your resume. Otherwise, it would be a good idea to place the ‘Education’ section at the end of the resume and type in the ‘Job Experience’ section instead.
-
4
The ideal length of a resume in terms of the number of pages used is one to two pages, unless you are applying for a job that requires you to provide extensive information about yourself. The attention of a hiring manager can easily be diverted if a resume contains irrelevant details and extraneous information.
-
5
Be careful with tenses. Use present tense for a description of your current job and use past tense for projects that you completed in the past.
-
6
Keep the formatting of the resume as consistent as possible. For instance, writing one job title in bold and the next one in italics would create a bad impression. Similarly, use of one font size for a particular section and a different font size for another would have the same effect.
-
7
Make sure that the font you used while typing the resume is easy to read as well as commonly found in Windows and Mac. Moreover, fine-tune the spacing of words and paragraphs in your resume to increase readability and comprehension. Microsoft Word is an ideal program that will make this step a lot easier for you.
-
8
Although it is alright to save the resume in Word format, it would be better to covert the document to PDF format. This is because PDF documents do not lose their appearance when opened on a different computer than the one on which they were originally composed.
