In the course of a week, I regularly review hundreds of resumes from Information Technology professionals from entry through executive levels. Over time, I have given advice to hundreds of people about writing a resume that is clear, concise, and eye-catching. Last week, I presented some of these ideas at two different events, so I thought it might be a good time to collect my thoughts about resumes in a blog post.No Microsoft Word? No Problem
As tempting as it may be to put together a resume in Adobe PDF format to preserve formatting, your electronic resume should probably exist in a Microsoft Word compatible format. This is a somewhat vile situation for graphic design professionals for whom preserving the integrity of white space, fonts, and layout is incredibly important as a demonstration of mastering the basics of good design; however, I guarantee that most any recruiter you work with will, upon receiving a PDF formatted resume, ask you for Microsoft Word. Applicant Tracking Systems simply don't scan PDF's.
If you do not have Microsoft Word handy, there are many alternative options. In addition to the now ubiquitous-seeming Google Documents, you can also use Zoho web apps, or even download the very respectable and stable Open Office Suite. Windows comes with an app that can save in Word 6.0 format or you could always save a document in Rich Text Format (RTF), but these formats may prove limiting in designing your masterpiece resume.
What about a Text Resume?
A text (TXT) format resume is also something you should have in your repertoire. Why? If you're filling in resume builder forms online, most do not take kindly to fancy formatting and tables. In terms of a readable resume showing up in an employer's applicant tracking system (ATS), it is a worthwhile use of your time to have a minimalist text version.
Sections of the Resume
Generally speaking, I'm a fan of using a combination of a functional resume that provides an overview of skills and abilities and a chronological resume that provides a year-by-year job history. Creating a resume that is exclusively functional will make it look like you have something to hide (like a spotty job history). Likewise, an exclusively chronological resume reads like a dry list and requires too much patience of a reader to tease out details.
That being said, I'm usually looking for the following sections in a resume: Contact Information, An Objective or Professional Summary, Selected Accomplishments, Work History or Experience, Education and/or Certifications, and a Summary of Technical Skills. These sections need not appear in the same order all the time, except, of course, that the contact information had better be near the top of the resume! However, if you are a recent graduate with little or no work experience, it makes more sense to put your Education section near the top than at the end. Likewise, if you are an IT executive, you probably do not want your technical skills to appear near the top of the resume unless you want to appear to be more of a technician than a manager.
Contact Information
Your contact information needs to appear near the top of the resume, especially if this is something you are uploading to a career site or e-mailing to a recruiter. When a resume gets scanned into an applicant tracking system, the ATS tends to look for contact information to parse out and drop into the appropriate fields for first name, last name, e-mail address, and so on. If that resume does not have the information where the parsing mechanism expects to find it, the resume still makes it into the system, but leaves these fields empty or full of garbage text. Probably the last thing you want is to show up in someone's database as a garbled entry, right?
For the same reason, I strongly advise against dropping your contact information into the page Header section. This doesn't get scanned--most parsing functions in ATS's just aren't that sophisticated! The result? More garbled entries.
A pet peeve of many recruiters, me included, is when the job seeker includes only a first name in the resume, or an initial and a last name, or some permutation thereof. In many cases, job seekers who do this are international consultants who believe they have a name too difficult for recruiters. However, the single-name resume once again doesn't work well with contact parsing technology. In addition, it just looks dodgy.
As for the mailing address, I would say that the precise street address is something you no longer need. Although I am quite certain that in 85% of the cases, I can find your current mailing address through the judicious application of a few web tools and some cross-referencing, if it makes you feel better to conceal your exact address by leaving it off, I'm good with it. However, it would be helpful for me to at least know what city, state, and zip code in which you currently reside. Again, we're brought back to the nature of ATS's for my reasoning. When I am searching within my ATS database for an appropriate candidate, location is often a major bit of information I'm seeking. It is hugely more convenient for both you and recruiters to talk about jobs that are actually within a commutable distance in these gasoline-conscious times.
Finally, be sure to include the phone number and e-mail address you will check regularly for messages. If you include more than one number or e-mail address, you may wish to indicate which one is preferred. Also, that e-mail address? Try to avoid cutesy names or anything that would make you look less than professional. If you are a graphic design professional with an online portfolio or keep a professional blog, it is probably a good idea to include a link here, too.
Objective or Professional Summary
Ask a dozen people whether you should have a job objective on your resume, and you will probably receive about twenty different answers. As a general rule, I dislike puffy objectives that assure me of excellent people skills, team-playery tendencies, and strong technical skills. Instead, if you're applying for a software engineer job, say just that... Objective: A .NET software engineer position with a Chicago-based company.
For more experienced professionals, particularly managers and above, you should consider a more detailed professional summary consisting of a few sentences. Remember that readers of resumes tend to skim in much the same way that people browse the web, so break any paragraph of more than four lines into two paragraphs.
Selected Accomplishments
I like to think of this section in the same way that journalists use callouts to highlight key information or compelling quotes. Following an objective or professional summary, you still want to guide your reader and encourage him or her to read further. You need something compelling and interesting to do that. In the case of your resume, that compelling content has to be your major accomplishments. Choose no more than three major accomplishments from your career that stand out. What did you do and how did you do it? What did it mean for your employer in terms of savings or efficiencies achieved?
If you are having trouble thinking of which accomplishments to select, consider the job to which you're applying. Whenever possible, gear your accomplishments to the job opportunity at hand. In addition, these accomplishments should be things you would normally bring up in the course of an interview sooner rather than later.
Work History / Experience
Most people have a pretty good grasp of this section of the resume, but a few peculiar issues arise here that I see as problems and will mention. Your job history should appear in reverse chronological order, with your most recent job first. Each entry should include the company name, dates of employment (I prefer to see month and year), job title, a brief statement about the nature of the company and what you did there, and several key accomplishments. If you are a technical professional, including details about the technology environment (OS's, tools, methodologies) and team sizes are not unwelcome.
The biggest danger in this section is letting it ramble on for far too long. If you are a professional with 5-10 years of experience, your resume should probably stick to between 2-4 pages in length. Professional consultants and older workers tend to be at a disadvantage because this resume section grows due to a large volume of contracts or simply a long work history. My usual advice is to keep that resume under 5 pages if at all possible, so if you need to limit your contract details to the past ten jobs or the past ten years of work history, do so. You can always add a statement at the end of the section indicating that a complete work history is available upon request. Some resumes I have seen deal with this problem by just listing some "big name" companies that do not appear in detail as a teaser for the interviewer to ask for more details.
Education / Certifications
Even if you have not completed a degree and only have a year or two of college, it's important to include that information in an Education section. If you leave Education off of the resume entirely, you will raise questions (or maybe not get a call for the job at all). Certifications are also important. While many hiring managers I've worked with look upon certifications with a healthy amount of skepticism, most look upon a cert as a sign of professional commitment and like to see someone with experience and a cert. Certifications without experience seldom sway anyone, but I'd still include it if that's all you've got to work with.
For older workers, a frequent question I get is whether to omit the year of college graduation. There is nothing inherently damaging about doing this, but any experienced resume reviewer will realize what you're doing. Of course, an experienced reviewer will also, I hope, recognize the peril of discriminating on the basis of age.
Tech Skills Summary
Finally, if you are an Information Technology professional who uses a variety of tools and technologies, you should include a section that summarizes your skills in a way that's easy to scan. I have seen this section at the beginning of the resume (prior to work experience) or at the end (in the case of executives who want to show understanding of tools but do not want to place emphasis upon hands-on execution).
You could take the Monster.com tack of listing the skill, years used, and most recently used. While it's not too pretty to review, it is practical. Another approach is to break out skills according to Operating System, Database, Programming Language, Methodology, and so forth. Whatever the approach, the goal is to make it easy for someone to quickly ascertain your skills.
The Question of Cover Letters
I could write an entirely different entry on cover letters, but I will say that I find an introductory message in an e-mail to provide a context for a resume helpful. It is a matter of courtesy and good communication skills to write at least a sentence or two to indroduce a resume attachment. A more formal or cold cover letter should provide a concise introduction covering where you heard about the opportunity, why you're interested, why you're qualified, and your availability for interviewing. Long preambles and ambling dissertations about work history seldom (never) get read.
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