Taibros.net

It’s about that time of the year where finding a job/internship is on the mind for many students. Being a HR major and having read many resumes professionally and as a friend, here are some tips that you might find helpful.

1. Responsibilities vs. Action - Use action words. Start your bullet points or paragraphs with a verb. Responsibilities included organization and implementation of X program? No! Implemented X program for X audience? Yes!

2. Accoutered a team of ten with X training - Use words that are common. Don’t make recruiters look up words. Some of those “I scored an 800 on my SAT” words will not come up on resume searches because normal people don’t use them. When trying to find words to use, think about the words that a recruiter would search for. Accoutered? No! Coached? Equipped? Yes!

3. Get to the point - Be brief. Stick to one page if you are just starting out. Only executives, in my opinion, should have 2+ pages. Recruiter reads many resumes a day. Help the recruiter pick you out by inserting a summary of qualifications near the top of your resume.

4. Font matters - Use at least a 10 pt. font. Use a professional font like Times New Roman. Please spare the Comic Sans.

5. Tailor each resume for a specific job - Use the right objective. If you have an objective on your resume, make sure it makes sense for the job to which you’re applying. If you wrote an objective that does not match the job, that’s an automatic weed out. If you are not sure what you want to do, don’t have an objective for the sake of having one. Leave it out and save space for something else.

6. To PDF or not PDF. That is the question - Read the submission criterion. Follow it. Many people jump too quickly and send a PDF, thinking they will avoid all of the formatting problems. Some companies, even large ones, do not have systems that can readily read and process PDF files. If they ask for a Word document, please send a word document. If you do send a word document, make sure that you’re using a font that comes standard with Word. Otherwise a recruiter will see stars and symbols and have to manually enter in your resume. That, my friend, is not a good thing.

7. Check for errors before you send - Read your resume before sending. When in haste, people will send resumes with spelling and grammatical errors. I have seen some resumes where the person has addressed their objective sentence to the wrong company. Don’t get yourself eliminated because you can’t rite good.

Hope these tips helped. If you want me to read over your resume or have any questions, email me or leave a comment. Happy job hunting!