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The Best Way to Make a Resume

August 22nd, 2009

We do not know if anybody can find the best way to make a resume, but at least we can offer you a few suggestions. Keep your resume short and clean! Before you start, choose the perfect structure for your resume. The most important information such as your skills and recent experiences you have had must be placed in the top of your resume in order to be seen very quickly by the person who will look it over. The sections that you need to include in your resume are the profile, achievements, experience, special skills (computer knowledge / foreign language), education, training, and (if you want) interests. Your resume should be written on two pages.

Make your resume look good. In order to attract attention and to be appreciated by those who read it, your resume must be written beautifully, fairly, cleanly and attractively. Make sure that your resume is accurate, and keywords are visible. Use tools to mark the sentences in the resume and make sure they are short and concise. It is very good to have a space between the sections of your resume to make it easily readable and easily to follow the information in it.

The most recent activities must be mentioned first. Mention the history of your jobs in descending order, starting from the top with the last institution where you were employed. Try to avoid if you had long periods in which you did not work, and if there were serious reasons why this happened, mention them. Do not mention details about the positions you have held 10 years ago. Include details about temporary jobs you had only if they are relevant to the position for which you are applying.

Add many events. Mention in your resume only your duties at every job where you were employed. Write all the achievements, responsibilities, and results you had. Talk about the results you had and the differences made thanks to your being involved. When you mention your achievements use numbers. For example you can say “Increasing sales by 20% in the first year” and always use formal manners, do not ever use the personal pronoun “I “, i.e. “team supervision” instead of “I watched the team”. Use the past to explain the places where you worked before, and the present for the current job.

Do not make a long list including special skills, such as foreign languages, administrative skills and skills related to the computer in a separate section of your resume. Do not mention them on every job where you have used them. At this point, you can also include IT knowledge. A list where you enumerate tools and programs you have used at your previous jobs can make your resume very difficult to be read and you will not be remarked, or you will not be more special than those who have the same abilities.

Give the life to your resume. Remember that the employer wants to know from you what kind of person you are, what personality you have, and what you can do. Are you punctual, conscientious, and motivated? Can you reach the company’s expectancies? For each point written in your resume, you should think and you ask yourself, “What does this say about me?”. Following these easy steps, you can find the best way to make a resume.

10 Tips on How to Make a Resume

May 24th, 2009

1. Base your resume on simplicity. A resume is the first and probably the last opportunity to ensure an interview. It is therefore extremely important that your resume work in your favour and not vice versa. Use it to draw attention on your work force, on your achievements, and on your technical knowledge.

2. Your achievements should occupy an important place. It is very good to use a series of active verbs, such as I made, I planned, I organized, I was responsible for, I controlled, etc. It is not recommended to use all kinds of signs for organizing your ideas; a resume can be read more easily if it is clear.

3. Reversed chronology is important. When you start to complete your experience, you must start with the last job and then to continue in the same reversed chronological order with the following, without forgetting to mention the employer’s name, the beginning and end date of your job, the title of the job and a short description of it, plus your achievements. If you are looking for a job for the first time, you should complete any relevant experience, paid or not.

4. Be honest. If you lie in a resume, not only you do not do any good, but also at the same time, you make potential employer lose time for nothing. To add six months of extra experience in a job may seem a good idea, but if the information is verified, make sure you will not get the job. However, do not sell yourself too cheap either! If you think that the three summers you spent in France, working as a volunteer, have helped you to know the country and its culture, then say it!

5. IT skills are important. You have to write absolutely everything you can do on computers: hardware knowledge, software, programming languages, databases, etc. In addition, do not mention things that you have not done lately, or worse, what you have never done. If at the interview you are asked about that operation, you will feel ridiculous, not knowing what to answer.

6. Education. Pay close attention to your big achievements during the faculty. Nevertheless, this is no longer relevant if you work in a specific area for more than two years.

7. Organize your resume. Do not reduce your resume as long as the content is relevant to the job for which you have applied. If the possible employer is annoyed reading your resume, he or she will quickly lose interest.

8. Grammatical mistakes. No employer will seek a person who has not bothered to correct his or her own mistakes. Do not rely on a quick viewing of your resume, read it over two or three times very carefully.

9. Two pairs of eyes. After you have checked it yourself, ask someone to read your resume, as somebody who is not used to reading such material can easily detect mistakes. Do not try to fill your resume at once, always come back to it, and check it after a few days.

10. References. Check your references before you use them. There is nothing worse than to use the name of a person who either moved or has something against you. The best people you need to use for references may be your current employer or a professor from college or high school.