Changing gears looking at people who don’t have the flair for going it alone, putting together a resume is the first step. There are may styles of resumes, but a few important things should be part of any good resume.
In the reality check column, the word ‘resume’ loosely translated means ‘application for a job interview’. It is all about getting that invitation for that interview. Once at the job interview you must sell yourself.
In a tight job market, there will be hundreds of job applicants for a single job, and it will be someone’s task to reduce that pile of resumes down to about 10 to 15 to be called in for the first interview. So to survive that first sort probably the most important rule is not to piss that person off with fancy small fonts. Not everyone has eyes like a hawk and after reading hundreds of resumes, a very real headache can be in full swing after prolonged eye strain. Times New Roman 12 point is the easiest to read because it matches how we were taught to print letters when we first started reading and writing.
The next thing is call attention to your resume. A pile of 300 resumes can easily be 6 inches (15cm) tall. When in a pile all the resumes look the same. There is no rule that says your resume needs to be on white paper or any other color for that matter. People that select a fancy type of paper that may have some texture to it, their resume still becomes invisible in the pile. However if you print your resume on a bright color paper like yellow, it stands out in the pile and calls attention to itself. The key here is to keep calling attention to your resume and that gets it back on the top of the pile. That means it will be read more than once and start to become part of the consideration for the interview call.
The next thing in writing your resume involves what has been known as custom resumes. This means you tailor your resume for the potential job. This will be covered in depth in part 9.
In our minds we know what we are good at and what we suck at. There is also a consideration that some jobs we are good at, we simply hate. In a tight job market there is a real possibility you could end up with a job you hate. So in good times it becomes a habit not to put the things we hate to do on our resumes. In bad times although you may not want to, it should go on. This is a personal decision and hard times call for hard choices.
Knowing how much to put on your resume is also a consideration and that too will be covered in another part of this series. Some people have a lot of experience and condensing or elimination of things will be talked about.
Next part 9 so check back or hit the subscribe button.
