What Is a Resume?
A resume is a summary of your work history, skills, and education usually extend over up to 10 years’ worth of employment. A resume is the most demand document in any job search where recruiters analyze job candidates' resumes more closely than their cover letters.
Regular Types of Resumes
A Chronological Resume is the most familiar format that you’re probably with. This is the type of resume that focuses on your latest work history above all. List your positions in reverse chronological order, with the most latest positions at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. Eventually, the goal is to indicate how your positions leading up to this point have ideally prepared you for the role you’re applying to.
A functional resume, on the other hand, stresses the relevance of your experience. To build a functional resume, you’ll prominently centerpiece your professional summary, your skills, and a work experience section organized by how closely the positions relate to the position you’re applying to. This format is best for those who want to minimize resume gaps, or are transitioning into a new industry.
A combination resume is a resume that borrows from both of the previous formats where you’ll combine the professional summary and skills section of a functional resume with the work experience section of a chronological resume. This format is a powerful way to stand out to recruiters by emphasizing both your experience and skills and is useful for many different types of job seekers.
How to Structure Your Resume
1) Header & Contact Info
At the top of your resume, always include a header with your name. Your contact info (usually your phone number, personal email address, and sometimes links to social profiles or personal websites) should be nearby as well. Most importantly, there should not be any uncertainty over who the resume owns by, or make it hard for recruiters or hiring managers to reach out to you. Avoid putting your contact info in the header or footer of the document itself because the headers and footers can sometimes be missed by the software that scans your resume.
2) Professional Summary
A brief, one- to three-sentence section featured prominently on your resume shortly narrates who you are, what you do, and why this job is perfect for you. Professional summaries aren’t about what you want but what are values you could bring to as a potential employer. It’s an advantage noting that a professional summary isn’t an absolute must-have in your resume, if your resume is missing one, it probably won’t be a dealbreaker but it can be a nice way to give time-pressed recruiters and hiring managers a quick, high-level overview of why you’re the right person for the job.
3) Skills
As recruiters and hiring managers increasingly look for candidates with specialized backgrounds hence the skills section has become more and more important once relegated to the bottom of resumes as an afterthought. List all your skills clearly Rather than making the folks reading your resume hunt through your bullet points to find them. They will become more interested to take your resume seriously if they see right away that you have the ability to get the job done.
4) Work Experience
This crucial section of a resume is where you detail your work history in a consistent and compelling format. Company names, locations, employment dates, roles, and positions should be included in the Work Experience section. Besides that, it should contain bullet points containing action verbs and data points that detail the relevant accomplishments of each position. This portion is basic for recruiters and hiring managers, who choose to absorb information from your job experiences and connect your skills to what they’re looking for in a potential hire. In a crowded pack of resume submissions, recruiters have to carefully source and identify quality candidates.
5) Education
Since many jobs require a certain level of education, It is very important to mention your academic credentials on your resume. In most cases, you just need to simply list where is your previous school, when you attended and what degree you attained will be enough.
6) Additional Experience
Additional Experience is an optional, but potentially very valuable, addition to your resume. This is a catch-all section at the tail end of your resume that allows you to highlight volunteer experience, awards, and hobbies. This section shouldn’t be too long because you don’t want it to detract from your skills or work experience but it can be a good way to show a more well-rounded picture about you!
Design & Formatting Tips
Use these rules of thumb to ensure that your resume looks its best.
Use an easy-to-read font of no less than 11 pt.
Add margins of at least .7 inches.
Make sure there’s sufficient white space between sections.
Don’t go overboard with intricate design or decoration — touches of color are fine, but avoid any clashing or visually busy details.
If you’re going to print out copies of your resume, invest in good paper, and use a high-quality printer.
Don’t save your resume as a PDF unless the application specifically says it accepts PDF files. Some applicant tracking systems scan PDFs as if they were one big image, which fails to capture your information.
Keep your resume to 1-2 pages max, unless you’re in a field like academia or medicine and must cite papers and publications.
A well-prepared resume is crucial to determine whether you'll get the position of your dream or not. In Recruit Hero, we are here to help you found the perfect job without wasting your time searching. How is it possible? Recruit Hero has an AI-driven platform that is featured to smart-match talents based on employers’ job requirements. So, sign up today at Recruit Hero to explore more jobs! Stay tuned and do follow our Facebook and LinkedIn for more.