A résumé is a way for an employer to review your work experience and skills. It’s also your chance to explain what separates you from other candidates. Whether it’s a particular accomplishment (being named employee of the month) or volunteering for the summer, you never know what might impress your potential boss. However, you shouldn’t make your résumé into your autobiography. It still needs to be simple and to the point. Here are some simple tips to improve your résumé:
1. Put your name and contact information clearly visible at the top. This makes it easy for the reader to recognize whom their looking at when shifting through a large pile of résumés.
2. Briefly explain your employer along with what you did there. A US-employer may not recognize the name of a company you worked for back home. A sentence or two explaining the type of business they did can be helpful.
Ex: Elijah’s – Popular intimate light dinner restaurant and lounge in downtown district.
Northwest Property Management – Northwest Property Management is a $10 million retirement community management company with over 20 properties across the United States.
3. Use bullet points to describe your activities. This breaks the information into pieces that are easier for the hiring manager to scan through. It also helps them find a crucial piece of information when they come back to your résumé during an interview. You should use between two and six (2-6) bullets for each position you’ve held. This includes different positions at the same employer.
4. List accomplishments prominently on your résumé, but you also want to quantify them. This means showing hard data about what you’ve done. Here’s an example:
Wrong Way: Promoted a lot by doing well in my job.
Right Way: Promoted three times in three years by learning job quickly and helping improve accounting system design to generate more useful reports.
Can you see the difference between the two? The first sentence makes a vague claim, while the second sentence gives good details that show what you are capable of.
5. Show your résumé to someone else to proofread. There is nothing more embarrassing or frustrating than having your résumé passed over because of a misspelling. This advice is doubly important for anyone writing in a language other than his or her native tongue.
You also can go to someone you know who holds a job in the industry that you would like to work in. Even if they cannot hire you, they probably see a lot of résumés and can tell you what kind of information they are most interested in finding out about a candidate.
That’s all for this installment. Please leave a comment if this was helpful to you. Almost every college has a career development office. There, you can find even more resources on finding a job. Good luck to all you students out there!
