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Make Your Resume Compelling and Easy to Read
by Susan Zitron Woods
Zitron Career Services
Resume Styles and Formats
It is imperative that you use a professional and accepted formula to prepare your resume. If you do not, your resume could be tossed in a pile with others that do not meet accepted standards. The nationally recognized resume format preferred by the majority of employers, human resource managers and executive recruiters is the chronological, fact and achievement resume. If, however you are changing careers, then it is perfectly acceptable to showcase your transferable skills into a functional format. Examples of each follow on the last three pages of this article.
There is no mystery to resume writing when you use either of these formats, which are designed to showcase your technical and/or managerial skills and work history-the facts-and, done well, will highlight your ability to solve problems, commonly described in the resume as your achievements or accomplishments. For the work history section, begin by listing current or most recent employment and continuing back to your career beginnings. Your education, coursework and professional associations should follow work history, unless you are a student, in which case, the reverse is true, with work history trailing. Try and keep information relevant to your new job opportunity. If you learned to speak Korean ten years ago but have lost your skills, leave it out.
Biographies Are Not Resumes
In this age of the Internet, it is important to present your career history in a style that allows the reader to quickly learn a lot about you. Resumes that present your message with brief, bulleted statements are easiest to read and most favored by interviewers. Those written in a biographical style using pronouns, like "I was the manager of the marketing department" take longer to read. Unfortunately, biography formats, will represent you as someone who is not savvy on current resume development techniques, a criteria you cannot afford in this highly competitive global marketplace.
Increase Your Chances With the Gate Keepers
Imagine that you are an employer or executive recruiter who has just received anywhere from 25 to 125 resumes. Which would you read first? The resume filled with paragraph upon paragraph of information you have to decipher, or one you can peruse in an easy-to-read, fact and achievement format? The answer is obvious.
Whether the screener is a human resources representative, a hiring authority, or a recruiter, they will place the difficult to read resumes on the bottom of the pile, and focus on the ones most quickly and easily identifiable with the skills and experience they are seeking. It is your job to make sure yours is in the second list. If for some reason a company has not contacted you, but you believe they should want your expertise, greatly increase your chances for being interviewed by revising your resume immediately using either the chronological or functional structure, and resubmit it.
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