Writing a Resume

Writing a Resume

Your resume isn’t your autobiography. It’s a short document, meant to show an employer that you’re a desirable candidate for an available job. Writing an effective resume presents you as a well-qualified, interesting individual who is worthy of a face-to-face interview.

Employers may receive over 100 resumes for a single job opening. While ideally each candidate would receive equal time, the fact is that employers typically sort through a pile and put the most appealing specimens at the top of the heap. Statistically, your resume has about ten to twenty seconds to either float to the top (for further analysis) or sink to the bottom (obscurity in the employer’s personnel files).

Steps to Writing a Resume

Gathering Information

Whether you’re writing a resume for one employer or several, the job of writing a resume is much easier when you take the time to put all of your information in front of you. Besides that, putting all of your information in one place gives you a handy reference to make sure that each resume you write has all the information you want to disclose to prospective employers. It also makes updating and writing new resumes easier than starting from scratch.

Resumes are divided into three sections: experience, skills, and education. Using these sections, brainstorm a list of all the data that might be pertinent to getting the job you want now and jobs you may consider in the future.

If you’re writing a resume for a specific job, put the employer’s job description at the top of the list and use it to target the specifics you’ll include in that resume. If you’re looking into positions with several different employers, you may want to write more than one resume for each individual job. Using a list helps you “slice and dice” your information, emphasizing qualities that are most relevant to each specific job.

Choosing a Resume Format

The three most common resume formats are the reverse chronological format, the skills format, and the combination format. Some resume formats conform to a specific type of employment. However,