If you’ve read Part 1 of this series, you know that the first and most important thing about a resume is simplicity. This article will follow suit—no fancy tricks with fonts or margins here, just a quick and easy guide to writing a resume that will impress an employer without pomp or ostentation.
If you’ve ever written a resume before, chances are you’ve either looked at a friend’s or searched online “resume templates” or “how to write a resume.” (There’s a pretty good chance that’s how you found this article!) It’s incredibly easy to Google one of those phrases or a similar one and find dozens upon dozens of resume building sites, templates, guides and ideas. Our first piece of advice: don’t follow any of them! That may seem counter-intuitive—after all, this article is one of them—but the reasoning is clear. If you download a template or follow a guide to the letter, chances are your employer will have seen that exact resume hundreds of times before. This is especially true of downloadable resume templates, which often have eye-catching elements like colored bars or fleur-de-lis bullet points.
So: don’t follow any one guide verbatim. Read a bunch of them, figure out what the common elements are, and build a resume based on the best ideas from each. That said, there are a few points that should be relatively constant in a good resume. For instance:
• Always put your name and contact info on the top. No matter what else it contains, the point of the resume is to advertise you—and it can’t do that if the employer has to search for your information. Your name should be in a larger font than any other info as well, just so it pops out. Hint: Never use a different font for your name or any other piece of info! Pick a classic like Times New Roman and stick with it.
• Keep it short. We covered this in the last article, but it bears repeating. Two pages, max. This means you’ll have to focus on cutting down unimportant material. Do you have two email addresses and three phone numbers listed? Cut them. You only need one of each. Long list of all the software you know how to use? “General computer proficiency,” plus specific programs necessary for the job.
• List only the most relevant and important items. This will serve both to keep your lists of past jobs and skills short and tell your potential employer all the most important things about you.
• Similarly, list the most important things first. If you’re a student, put your Education section up front. That will explain all those summer jobs, which otherwise might look like you can’t keep a position for more than three months. If you’re out of school, save Education for the bottom. It matters, but not as much as what you’ve done since you graduated.
Decluttering a resume is like decluttering a house: difficult to start, but incredibly satisfying once you’re done. Don’t hesitate—take a machete to it! You can always add more later. But in this case, less is best.