Building your resume.

Building Your Resume.

By Tom Warren

Imagine yourself in an America whose unemployment rate is 0%, now slowly bring yourself back to reality. With our nations unemployment rate at a steady 9.5 percent (According to the July, 2010 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) a lot of those who are unemployed feel helpless, especially those of you who are in states with unemployment rates reaching over 13%. You start asking yourself, how will I pay for my mortgage, my rent, food, gas, and the list goes on.

So many people have been laid off or terminated from jobs which they worked for most of their lives. Being thrown into the pool of unemployment can be a frightening, and belittling feeling. Where do I start? How do I market myself as a dependable asset to a company with limited skills? The era of getting a job on a promise and a handshake has come and gone. The resume now reins supreme.

Resume: A document that portrays a persons skills, abilities, previous work experience, qualifications and education. Seems easy enough, right? Wrong! On a daily basis anywhere from 30-100 resumes come across my desk; of that number maybe 5 are worth the cost of the paper they are printed on. That leaves the rest getting a one way ticket to your local landfill. The question now is how do I get into that five and not the garbage can. There are a million ways to get into that five and a million and one ways to shoot yourself in the foot. The number one problem most job seekers have with their resumes is content. Either they overwhelm the reader with an abundance of information, or they lack enough content to properly display their abilities. These are both sure fire ways of decreasing your chances of getting an interview. So where is the happy medium?

One of the largest debates I run into with resumes is the length or number of pages it should be. There is an answer to this question for those who are looking for it. And the answer is…it all depends. There are some work arenas that call for extensive information of your background. For instance, a job that is higher than entry level, but below an executive level can be two pages. Jobs that require you to display technical backgrounds including engineering or other related fields can be two pages. When an employer asks for references, this should be done on a second page. These are just a few examples of when a second page can come into play. My opinion on this subject, keep it to a single page. My experience and research into this question has found that the average employer takes anywhere from 15-45 seconds reading a resume. If you find one of those hiring managers that is in the 15-25 second category. You can say goodbye to page two ever being seen, let alone read.
Here are some quick pointers when creating or editing your resume.
1) Redundancy wastes spaces. Using the same words over and over is boring and a space killer.
2) Be sure to engage the reader.
3) Use action words/verbs like championed, generated, spearheaded etc...
4) Create a format that is appealing to the eye. Don't be a plain resume in a stack of plain resumes.
5) PROOF READ YOUR RESUME!
Check back later (And for those of you who are looking at this in the future) see my links and posts for more ways to create an interview winning resume!