How to Prepare Resume

Major dos and don’ts to Prepare Resume

You would be familiar with the feeling that comes when you spend hours, or even days in preparing a resume. You pore over all the words in your cover letter and strive over each word in your email. Then you send it and wait, and wait, and wait. No one calls, no one writes. You don’t even know that anyone ever saw your resume. When this occurs, it’s straightforward to get depressed and imagine that employers are not interested in you. Don’t! Worry, they haven’t met you. They have merely seen your resume and that may be the problem. If you’re not getting any response from the employers, try these tips to get your resume working for you

Well Prepare Your Resume!

Keep your resume of the right length. You may have heard that your resume is supposed to fit on one page. This is rubbish. Your employers don’t care if your resume is one or two pages long. Rather they do care whether it is easy to understand and gives significant information upfront or not. Your resume can be one, two, or even three pages. If you are in doubt follow the following rule that less than 5 years experience most likely requires one page and more than that may require two.

While preparing your resume, clearly position yourself as someone who can meet the needs of the employer. Consider your resume as an advertisement for a service or product, but this time the product is yourself and the services are your expertise. Positioning of things is everything. The person who accepts your resume will scan it hurriedly maybe for not more than 20 seconds to decide whether you can help the business. Your responsibility is to say swiftly, clearly and loudly that you can. Don’t just jump into a chronology of your career history. Instead of this spell out your message at the start of the resume in a profile segment which highlights your key strengths in an attractive, easy-to-read format.

Career Objective

Don’t start your resume with an objective because a lot of Human Resource Managers don’t like resume objectives since they focus on the requirements of the job itself not on the needs of the potential employer. Consider this objective statement:

"Seeking a System Engineer job with a progressive employer where I can contribute to the growth and expansion of new technologies and work with bright, committed people."

This may be truthful but it is irrelevant to the reader, who does not care what you desire and only cares what you have to present. So in place of an objective, use a positioning statement that plainly and in a few words explains what you have to offer.

"Senior Telecommunication Engineer with 10 years experience developing leading-edge technologies."

Now the reader can straight away see your value. For even better impact, tailor this statement for each position to emphasize the match among the company’s requirements and your skills.

Body of your Resume

Outline your achievements as well as responsibilities clearly in your resume. Majority employers already recognize what the major responsibilities of your job were. They want to make out what makes you special from all the other applicants. A valuable resume summarizes job responsibilities in a few sentences and then spotlights on providing information about proven achievements.

Include specifics in your resume and don’t try to make indistinct statements, like "contributed to product design" since this tells nothing about your genuine contribution. Instead be precise: "Performed market analysis for (name of product) to determine design and mechanics and led changes to original design. Received significant praise and sold over 4 million units."

This level of specification presents the reader the contributions you have made in the past and therefore the contributions you can be expected to make in the future.

Proof read your Resume

Read your newly prepared resume carefully over and over again. When you are certain that it’s spotless, have other people proof it! If even one word is misspelled the employer will assume that you didn’t know how to spell the word (which could be bad) or can represent that you didn’t care (which can be even worse!)

Your resume must be easy to read and the design of the resume is vital. A powerful resume design will drag the eye of the reader through the document, making it uncomplicated to keep reading and will highlight your key strengths noticeably. But if your resume is poorly laid out, jumbled or hard to read, it will be worthless before the reader recognize how qualified you are.

Consult Sample Resumes

To see examples of how to lay out your resume, go to the nearest library or bookstore and look in the career part. You will get collections of model resumes. Take time to know how the page has been laid out and then apply what you’ve learned to your resume. Alternatively, download sample resumes to see practical example of the resume preparing process.

During the process of your resume creation, don’t list irrelevant things such as hobbies except if they directly support your qualifications for the position. Never describe your marital status or the number of children you have. Omit non-professional affiliations such as political or religious volunteer work. However list the achievements of which you are proud of, you should not run the risk of alienating someone prior to even having your foot in the door.

Don’t be afraid to blow your own trumpet. While you should never lie, you should certainly take acclaim for the things you’ve accomplished. Some people prefer to give details of their achievements in an interview, but if your resume doesn’t spark interest, you may never get that chance. Prepare an internet ready version of your resume since if you are applying online, you will require a text-only resume because majority online systems don’t support formatting such as bold, italics, bullet points or lines.

Above is just a guideline preparing a professional resume. Remember, your resume is your proxy. Prepare your resume with great care.

Sample Resumes & Cover Letters