femalenetwork.com

Your Absolutely Essential First Step
When you picture the real-life distractions of a person who will read your resume, you have instant how-to answers for many tough decisions on what to include. She skims, turning pages with one hand while perhaps holding a sandwich in the other as she deals with incoming phone calls and answers questions from coworkers who pop into her office.

The company can’t interview everyone who sends a resume. So her assignment is to go through the current batch quickly and eliminate!

Therefore at every step you must choose clarity and tight phrasing that has impact, can be understood at a glance, in a layout that can be skimmed in seconds.

How to Layout Your Resume
• Leave a margin of at least ½” all around.
• Your name should appear centered in caps, with address and telephone number directly underneath.
• All headings should be in bold caps, underlined.

Experience
• Give date of each job, name of company, your job title. Be sure job title stands out by typing in boldface.
• Job descriptions should begin with action verbs, such as organized, initiated, increased.
• Double-space between accomplishments. This makes it easier for the reader to skim and catch vital information.
• List positions chronologically, most recent job first. Save valuable space by condensing details about jobs farthest in the past.

Education
• Name of school, degree, year, academic and extracurricular activities. You can report major accomplishments/positions under EXPERIENCE. If extracurriculars are weak, omit.
• List education first only if you have a high general weighted average or graduated with honors. Otherwise, place EDUCATION after EXPERIENCE.

References
Write “Available upon request.” This is useful psychological reassurance to employers that you have qualified individuals to back up your resume claims. Do not list references.

Resume’s Heart: Your Experience
Start each line with one or more strong verbs
• Organized and directed…
• Managed…
• Created and coordinated

OTHER useful verbs: trained, supervised, initiated, revised, planned, implemented, ran, developed, negotiated, designed, improved, increased, arranged, researched, reduced, systematized.

Get yourself a paperback thesaurus. Look up any words that don’t seem quite right and find alternatives that are.

Omit Downers
• Though I didn’t…
• The lack of sufficient personnel prevented…
• I was only in the position six months…

Yes, Yes, Must Include:
• Name
• Address
• Phone number (and fax if you have)
• Employment and intern dates
• Employers
• Job titles
• Job responsibilities
• Job accomplishments
• Education
• Professional affiliations
• Additional job-related skills, such as licenses, accreditation, languages, computer knowledge
• Race, religion, sex, nationality
• Photograph
• Marital status
• Whether you have children

No, No, Never Include:
• Description of health
• Childhood and upbringing
• References
• Salary expectations
• Availability (they assume now or soon after graduation)
• Reasons for leaving a job
• Employment demands
• Hobbies and personal interests, unless relevant to position you’re seaking
• Your job weaknesses
• Little-known abbreviations