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When preparing a winning resume you need to take care to avoid certain factors that can mar your chances of gaining an audience with the interviewer. What follow are rules of thumb that you should keep in mind when developing the document, if you really want it to be a winning resume. Of course if creatively done you can actually bend a few of these rules and achieve good results.
The basic thing to remember is that you should at all costs avoid the temptation to embellish facts. Keep in mind Mark Twain’s words – "Telling the truth means I don't have to remember what I said". Be honest. By all means play down the not-so-bright spots of your career but do not tell a lie. These days with stringent reference checks and easy communication, everything can be verified. Imagine being found out on a lie. It’s a small world and you could end up on the blacklist with online job boards as well as within your own industry.
In a truly winning resume – content is key, which means that adding fancy borders and taking a print on expensive parchment paper won’t really enhance your job prospects. In fact, you could actually hurt your chances of crossing the first hurdle, i.e. getting your resume selected for consideration. Do not pick a typeface more suited to the credit rolls of a Western or a speech bubble in a comic. Do some research on fonts that look good in PDFs and Word documents and those that are ideal for paper documents. By all means add weight to your name, heading, and achievements but do not dress up the resume too much.
Job applicants usually stray from the tried and tested to stand out from the crowd, and instead they make the H.R person’s job that much more difficult in searching what he is scanning the document for. With respect to making the reader’s job easier, do not prepare a wordy long-winded objective statement. Be precise and straightforward. A literary objective statement will not necessarily raise your chances of an interview call but will surely raise a chuckle from the person who reads it.
If you prepare your own resume then select a layout that is appropriate for the job being applied for, you should also be at ease working with that template or else formatting errors are bound to be noticed. You may miss these on the computer screen but they become easy to spot on printouts.
Do not leave out contact information of any kind. Ensure that your postal and electronic mail address is present as well as your telephone numbers so that you can be contacted anytime.
The language of the resume should not be drab and repetitive; use action verbs and appropriate adjectives. If you are experienced in your industry don’t fill the resume with work experience; focus on achievements. This works better because even if you are a good fit for the job, your age and perceived expectations regarding remuneration may stand against you. Also with regard to job descriptions try and avoid mentioning activities that you’d rather not perform in your new job. Stress and elaborate on those aspects of your work that you wish to build upon in your new job.
Remember, there are certain parameters that every resume has to meet. If your resume slips on these it risks being relegated to a place behind other resumes. On the other hand if you can follow the simple common sense thoughts mentioned, your resume becomes a powerful tool to showcase all that you have achieved in your professional career.
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