Around campus, folklore abounds about unorthodox methods for landing jobs. Students swap stories about how one woman got her job with a major pizza franchise by having her resume delivered in a pizza box, while another guy fresh out of college took the George Costanza approach—lying his way through the interview, even faking his age. Another one I’ve heard is that a software company had hired a skilled hacker, impressed by his ability to access the company’s confidential files.
Whether these tales are fact or fiction, I attribute them partly to wishful thinking—we want the hiring process to happen easily, almost magically, without having to do research or traverse hoops. We want the task of landing a job to be as simple as calling in a favor from Aunt Julie, or exchanging a chatty e-mail with an alum who knows of an opening. Mostly, we want to avoid having to write in order to get a job. But the fact remains that a perfect resume is usually essential for getting your foot in the door. Happily, lots of advice is available to guide you as you tread.
No one expects you to invent your resume from thin air; in fact, employers reading your resume expect you to know and follow the accepted conventions. Remember, you are often competing with hundreds of similar documents at a time, so you want yours to fit in yet stand out for the right reasons. Further, you must treat your resume as a living document that you will revise for the rest of your life. Most professionals change jobs five or more times, so their resumes are always in flux. So begin well by studying the conventions and basing your resume on a good model. And recognize that plenty of options and variations are available within the conventions. This chapter will help you to study the conventions, work within them, and write a winning resume.
Clearly, as a user of this handbook, you understand the value of using online resources to educate yourself. To educate yourself further about finding a job or an internship, I highly recommend the sites below.
There is no shortage of great resume writing advice on the web, often ocused on details for writing resumes targeted to a specific field of study or circumstances. Here are some recommended sites:
"How to Write a CV and Cover Letter" article from themarketinghelpline.com [5] (marketing)
"How to Write a Masterpiece of a Resume" article from the Rockport Institute [6] (career change)
"Resume Guide" from psychology.org [7] (psychology)
Sample resumes and advice from greatsampleresume.com [8] (template-based)
Guidance and sample resumes from careermatch.com [9] (overview and introductory)
I learned about resume writing from my students. The students with the best resumes, I found, were those who understood that a resume is principally an objective summary of your skills and achievements, secondly a subtly clever argument that you are worth hiring, and finally a reflection of your individuality. The key is to work within the conventions while building a resume that only you could have written. The best way to begin is to study the conventions, then mimic the qualities of a good model, with an eye for places where your individuality can emerge. With the help of your peers, I have provided you with excellent advice and resume models in the following pages. Finally, I should note here that employers sometimes use the terms "resume" and "curriculum vitae" (or CV) interchangeably, and both terms loosely mean "life summary."
The conventional resume is organized according to the sections that follow, moving from the top of the resume to the bottom.
There is no title for this section; it’s simply your name and contact information at the top of the page. This section is always presented at the top of the resume, taking up anywhere from two to five lines. Think of this section as highly readable data about yourself, and format and efficiently word accordingly, following these principles:
Some resume writers do not include an objective, either for reasons of space, personal taste, or because they want to hand out a lot of resumes at a career fair and think that an objective might not allow them to cast as wide a net. But most undergraduate resumes do include an objective, embracing these principles:
In this section, be at your most objective on the resume—simply report the facts. The order of information is up to you, but most writers begin by providing the title and address of their school. On the next line, provide your exact degree title, including a minor or program emphasis if relevant. Include your projected graduation date even if it is years away. Other material that might be included under "Education":
This section is the heart of the resume—the place where readers are likely to spend most of their time. Readers here expect concrete detail, an accessible format, and selective interpretation of detail. Methods used to achieve these goals include the following:
Computer Skills is not a mandatory resume section, although many students include it, knowing that employers are typically interested in your computer expertise. Present the material efficiently, as follows:
For this section, choose whichever title or combination of titles above best fits your examples. "Activities" is the most commonly used. Honors could be presented separately if they are impressive enough or if there are simply too many to include within the "Activities" section. In addition, follow these tips:
Employers generally like to see this section included as a convention and a courtesy, but in truth it is optional because employers already know that you can provide them with references. When you do include a References section, heed this advice:
Once your resume is composed, it must be quality checked. Three prominent issues that arise in a quality check are content, format, and computer-related problems.
As a final quality check, seek collective agreement that your resume is perfect. Other readers—your peers, professors, parents (gasp!), and the staff at your school’s Career Center—can add fresh perspectives (and even corrections) to your resume. You get the last word, of course, but be sure that more than one other person agrees that you have presented yourself in the best possible way on paper. It pays off.
To quality check your written resume, pay a visit to these sites:
"How to Proofread Your Resume" article from the ladders.com [12]
Accepted Balanced Calculated |
Coordinated Decorated Earned |
Experienced Facilitated Generated Handled Implemented Justified Keynoted Led |
Made Observed Participated Quantified |
Recognized Trained Unified Valuated Weighed |
The sample resumes that follow, which you can download by clicking on the link below, all came from student writers guided by tried-and-true conventions of content and form. All of these writers use the left margin for their headings followed by a new margin for the descriptions about one-third of the way across the page. Though the overall form of these resumes varies slightly, the resumes all include the traditional, expected sections of "Objective," "Education," "Experience," and "Activities," but the writers make sure to tailor the content to their background by making choices such as combining language skills with computer skills and activities with honors. Several of the writers chose to include material related to high school, both to fill out the page and because their high school experience was so recent. Note also that not everything detailed under "Experience" is a paid position—the resume by the first-year student smartly gets mileage out of volunteer experience at a campus weather service and a homeless shelter. Finally, the types of activities and honors showcased at the bottoms of the resumes range from fraternity awards to blood donorship to water-skiing, showing that these writers are interested in representing individual and interesting traits about themselves. By studying these conventional resumes and examining their likes and differences, you have models on which to build your own, whether you’re a first-year student or a graduating senior.
Click here to download a pdf of six sample conventional resumes. [14]
Even though technical fields favor conventional and old-school rules, many students, particularly those with extensive experience or a diverse background, stretch the limits slightly—and smartly—when creating their resumes. Creative format and content choices on your resume certainly are permitted, as long as they enhance rather than detract from utility and appearance.
Although format must remain accessible so the eye can readily scan the resume both horizontally and vertically, creative format choices such as the following can enhance resume content:
One way to elevate your resume is through difference. Special sections highlighting specific traits that employers seek can make your resume rise above the crowd. Typical approaches writers take include the following:
Two websites you can explore for tips on writing "skills" resumes reside at:
"Skills Resumes" article from St. Could State University [15]
"Tips to Show Your IT Skills on your Technology Resume" article from monster.com [16]
In the six sample resumes delivered by pdf when you click on the link below, you’ll find students who present their material creatively, experimenting a bit with form, tailoring the resumes to suit their background or circumstances, and stressing their skills and experiences to help them stand out from the crowd.
The first resume in the group stresses two related experiences by creating the category "Internships," which are presented with such thoroughness that the writer has the courage and wisdom to treat three unrelated jobs with only three lines. The second resume also stresses experience and skills by creating special categories, while the third resume—from a student with three professional experiences within her field—decides to spread the text out completely over the horizontal space of the page so that she has room to stress the details and value of her various internships. Her resume also ends strongly with special categories for leadership and additional professional qualifications—she even goes so far as to give the date on which she received clearance for Top Secret information.
In the last three resumes, all written by seniors who had recently graduated, physical prominence is given on the page to specialized computer skills, teaching certification and classroom experience, and an overall skills summary. The first writer, chasing a technical computing job, provides the URLs to which he has contributed so that readers can further investigate his credentials and affiliation, and he breaks down his computer skills into five separate categories. The next writer, seeking a teaching position, makes sure to spell out his specialized teaching background and shows how his volunteer experience involved teaching as well. The final resume, used by the writer to land an international sales job outside of her field, articulates her transferable skills and stresses her international travel and "Jane-of-all-trades" approach to life—a broad range which takes her from being a photographer for a large student newspaper to working as a kayak/mountain bike tour guide in Alaska.
All six of these resumes show that even the one-page constraint need not stop writers from exercising creativity of form and providing depth of content specific to their life circumstances. All of these resumes represent a high level of individuality, and our sense is that no one else but the writer could have composed them.
Click here to download a pdf of six sample advanced, more daring resumes. [17]
Undergraduates often tell me they are amazed at how long it takes to compose a resume (part of this is mere perception, I think, due to the weighty nature of the document’s importance). I tell them they should plan to spend between a few hours and a day every year revising their resume for the rest of their professional lives, and that an undergraduate resume with a strong foundation is their best preparation. Obviously, post-graduate and graduate student resumes are grounded in the same principles as undergraduate resumes, but new rules emerge with the new circumstances.
Unfortunately, many use the terms "curriculum vitae" and "resume" interchangeably, so writers are confused about whether there’s actually a distinction between them. Strictly speaking, a curriculum vitae (which translates to "course of life") is different from a resume in that it is aimed squarely at working within academia. Therefore, academic history—especially where it includes teaching, research, publications, and service—is fleshed out in much more detail than it would be in a resume. If you’re chasing an academic post with your CV, you need to stress the same "three-legged-stool" criteria by which tenure judgments are made: Teaching, Research, and Service. Some writers use these criteria within their CV headings, and all find ways to stress them within their descriptions. A section for publications—which helps reflect on both your teaching potential and research—is expected in a CV, and those who have not published might still provide a list of papers submitted, talks given, theses written, or conferences attended. The goal is to demonstrate professional involvement and the potential to serve a host university as a productive teacher, valuable researcher, and a person of service. Some schools and professional organizations provide sample CVs, and I urge ambitious graduate students to browse the web and model their CVs on those published by faculty in the program to which they are applying.
These websites from institutions of higher learning are tailored to grad students writing resumes and CVs:
"Graduate Students' Resume Writing Guide," from Dartmouth [18]
"Curriculum Vitae Tips and Samples," from the Career Services Office at the University of Illinois [19]The samples written by the six writers featured in the pdf below help represent the differences between undergraduate and post-graduate resumes. One fundamental distinction to be made is whether the resume or curriculum vitae (CV) is tailored towards a professional job or an academic position. As the samples show, those seeking a professional job stress skills and achievements that will apply to the job being sought, while those seeking admission to graduate school or an academic position stress teaching, research, and publications.
From a form standpoint, note that the writers did not constrain themselves to one page, and that they spread material evenly over multiple-page documents, providing the page number and name of the writer on those pages after page 1. A variety of font sizes and font types are used along with a generous amount of white space so that the material can be read easily, and parallel material (such as job titles and section headings) is treated in parallel fashion from one page to another. Finally, there are two different versions of a curriculum vitae by the same writer—one three pages long and one a single-page version—to demonstrate how a writer can provide a summary of material when a single-page CV is requested.
The content of these resumes and CVs is, by definition, specialized, assuming readers who want evidence of a high level of aptitude and performance. Therefore, the writers offer technical detail, and acronyms known within the field (IPM, ARM, TRIP, NCGE, ASTM, etc.) and practical outcomes are stressed. Even by the active verbs used within the resumes (co-authored, managed, oversaw, coordinated, taught, trained, investigated, etc.), we can see that roles involving authorship, collaboration, learning, leadership, and project management are showcased. With the graduate student and post-graduate resume, the goal is always to demonstrate advanced ability and a high level of accomplishment, witnessed by the specialized evidence presented.
You’ll find sample resumes by graduate students here:
"Sample Resumes for Graduate Students" from the University of Pennsylvania [21]
Sample graduate student resume from the career advice website workbloom.com [22]
One of comic Steven Wright’s jokes provides a nice little lesson in irony: "I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place." Similarly, our work lives are rich in irony: Just as technology has enabled any one of us to build a resume that is stunning in appearance, blaring bells and whistles, the irony is that technology now also sometimes requires us to create resumes virtually stripped of form and dazzle. Companies, especially large ones, occasionally require job candidates to submit a "scannable resume"—that is, a resume written so that a scanner, using optical character recognition software, can code your resume into a database. Once in the database, the resume can be selected for the later viewing by human eyes (yes, irony emerges again) based on the number of "hits."
Presumably, if a company is scanning your resume it will typically announce that fact and give you guidelines for writing and submitting it. If there is any doubt, you could always phone, e-mail, or visit a company’s website to determine if the company scans resumes. Frankly, computer scanning of resumes was much more popular in the 1990s and has waned in the years that followed, so you may never need to be concerned about the issue. However, if you do need to prepare a scannable resume, you must school yourself in matters of format, content, and method of delivery.
Here are two highly recommended sites on writing a computer scannable resume:
"How to Write an ATS Resume" from novoresume.com [23]
"Scannable Resumes Presentation" from the Purdue Online Writing Lab [24]
In the example provided via the link below, we see how a writer effectively adapted his resume to make it scannable by computer. Note that the writer favors the left margin, even for his name, and he provides a "Skill Keywords" section at the top to define his skills and maximize the number of hits that his resume will receive. Despite making sure the resume is scannable, the writer keeps his paragraphs short enough that they are still highly readable, and aside from the "Skill Keywords" section the content is the same as he would provide in a conventional resume.
Click here to download a pdf of a sample computer scannable resume. [25]
Links
[1] http://www.learnhowtobecome.org/15-best-job-search-sites/
[2] http://www.learnhowtobecome.org/online-job-search-guide/
[3] http://www.learnhowtobecome.org/career-resource-center/internship-resources/
[4] https://www.edumed.org/resources/student-online-guide-to-internships/
[5] https://themarketinghelpline.com/how-to-write-a-cv-and-cover-letter/
[6] http://rockportinstitute.com/resumes/
[7] https://www.psychology.org/resources/resume-guide/
[8] http://www.greatsampleresume.com/
[9] https://www.careermatch.com/job-prep/apply-for-a-job/resumes/resume-writing-full-guide/
[10] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/c8_p4.html
[11] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/node/1792
[12] http://info.theladders.com/career-advice/how-to-proofread-your-resume
[13] http://www.dailywritingtips.com/resume-writing-tips/
[14] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.styleforstudents/files/file/chapter 8/Resume1_new.pdf
[15] http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/resumes/skills.html
[16] http://career-advice.monster.com/resumes-cover-letters/Resume-Writing-Tips/Show-Your-Skills-on-Your-IT-Resume/article.aspx
[17] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.styleforstudents/files/file/chapter 8/Resume2_new.pdf
[18] http://graduate.dartmouth.edu/careers/services/resume.html
[19] http://www.grad.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/cvsamples.pdf
[20] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.styleforstudents/files/file/chapter 8/Resume3_new.pdf
[21] http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/gradstud/resumesamples.php
[22] http://workbloom.com/resume/sample/graduate-student.aspx
[23] https://novoresume.com/career-blog/ats-resume
[24] https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/job_search_writing/resumes_and_vitas/scannable_resumes_presentation.html
[25] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.styleforstudents/files/file/chapter 8/Resume4_new.pdf