5 Quick Tips for Improving Your Resume

Far too often people in the technical fields give themselves a great deal of leeway in the creation of their resumes. Here is a compiled list of five very easy things you can do to improve the look of your resume so as to impress your recruiter as well as your various interviewers and hiring managers.

Make sure your resume is only in full pages

A professional resume stays away from halves. If your resume is 1 ˝ pages, 2 Ľ pages, or any other number that includes a fraction, you need to rework the margins and add or subtract material to fit it within a complete page.

Don't leave anything out

Always include the following categories in this order: name, address, two phone numbers, email address, technical and functional skills, education, experience. Experience should be further broken down into: name of the company, city and state that you worked in, duration of the job, and your job title. Note: make sure your experience listed matched up with the understood industry standard of your job title.

Stay consistent

Especially with your font, grammar, and all around formatting. The most common mistakes usually occur when you’re updating from a previous version. Take a moment to check the particulars of your older resume and make sure you’re in the same line. Most people don’t have a preference for how you choose to format your resume as long as you’re consistent. Some things to avoid: using varying types of bullets, different font styles or sizes, and most especially the formatting around your dates of employment. If you use this format – Month, YYYY – be sure to continue in that vein.

Use action verbs

When describing you talents in the experience section of your resume, be sure to stick with action verbs when starting your sentences. i.e. (developed, implemented, led, managed, and so forth.)

Spell check, spell check, spell check

If you’re using Microsoft products, this is especially easy as a little red squiggly appears below misspelled words. Either way, you need to be sure that you give your resume to one other competent person to read and critique your work.

*Remember that your resume is a paper representation of you. It speaks for you when you cannot speak for yourself. Do not make the mistake of assuming you can make up for a bad resume by your in person interview - some companies will not let you get that far if your resume does not look exemplary. Remember that you want your resume to reflect you, not work against you. Taking the time to get it done properly will ensure success in the long term.