Recently, I’ve had several of my acquaintances, family members and friends ask me to review their resumes. What is especially frustrating for me reviewing resumes of people that I know is that I know them.  I know what they’re capable of. I know what their experience is like.  I know that they are so much better than their resumes are reflecting them.  At work I’ve been deluged by an epidemic of poorly written resumes.  And I’m sure that the many people I’m filtering out of my interview process are more talented, more experienced, and might be even perfect for the job, but the hiring process dictates that I rely on their resume first to tell me who I should interview.  Otherwise, I would be interviewing hundreds of people every week.  And if they’re not going to take the time to properly represent themselves to me, I’m not going to take the time out to interview them… Enough said!

Resumes tell an employer a great deal about you. Where you have been, where you are now, and where you are headed. This story needs to be told concisely and quickly.  One of my favorite managers of all time use to say to me: “Tell me the TIME; don’t build me a WATCH!” You have 30 seconds to convince the employer that your resume deserves some consideration. It needs to shout, “I am the one you want on your team!” 

It’s sole intent is to get the hiring manager or the recruiter calling you up for more information about you. From there you should get an in-person interview – hopefully if you didn’t screw up the phone call…

Length:

Unless you’re Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lee Iococca, or Jack Welch, you’re resume should be no longer than one page in length.  - You heard me right! One page – not one page and half. One page.  The second page, statistically speaking, almost never gets the same attention of the first page.  Well if you’re a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and you’ve been COO, VP of Sales and Marketing, than there’s probably an exception for you to have more than one page.  But for the 99% of us who do not have such a track record, ONE PAGE…

And no Tom, you don’t need a lot of white space- this is not artwork – it’s your resume.  Giving your resume white space is not going to magically get your resume to jump out at people.  Recruiters and hiring managers don’t really care about white space — they want to see the content.   Use a 10 point type and your margins can be .5″ left and right and .75″ on the top and bottom. 

The second page is relegated to the stuff in career that’s way back and most likely not too relevant to the job you’re applying for anyway. 

Color:

Not purple, not light blue, not eggshell white, not fuchsia, just WHITE.  And no need to get cute with it.  I recently received a resume with the candidate’s portrait lightly watermarked behind his text.  I’ve keep it on my bulletin board, not because I would ever call him for an interview, but it makes a GREAT conversation piece to my colleagues who come into my office and chuckle at it.  Don’t confuse marketing yourself with being ineffective.  Remember the point of a resume is to get the job.  In order to get the job, you need to do two things: relay the jobs you’ve had and also let the recruiter/hiring manager how well you’ve done them.  Marketing all of this information on a colorful piece of paper or as a book cover for the book you’ve authored (don’t ask!) is meaningless.

Header:

Name, address, email address, and your phone number.  If you want to put your home and your cell that’s fine.  And about that email address… spend $10 a year and get a grown-up domain name or go get a GMail account – it’s free and something simple to setup.  Not something with an AOL domain either – this isn’t 1993 – Tom!!!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to reply to “QTPie64@aol.com” or “EverQuest4Ever@optonline.com.” It’s blatantly ridiculous how the line of people’s professional lives and their goofy personal lives are blurred. Aargh! 

Order: 

After the Header, the rest of the resume should be jobs in reverse chronological order. Education all the way down at the bottom of the page.  Your education is important, but your job history is more important to me. Each job should have three parts to it:

1. Dates of the job first.  And YES please put the month.  When I’m looking at a person’s job history and it excludes months, I’m going to assume that they are hiding a considerable gap (more than 3 months) in their history. After the date a colon, your job title and if it’s a generic title like Marketing Manager, please put ‘of what?’ next to it: Marketing Manager of US Territories. 
2. Your job responsibilities and tasks in paragraph form.
3. Your accomplishments in bullet format one after another.