How to Create a Winning First Job / Student Resumé

 

First Impressions

The first 30 seconds are crucial when trying to convince a potential employer to read your resumé. So your resumé needs to be clear and concise. It should summarize your skill sets, accomplishments, work experience and credentials that are important to the potential employer – all in one or two pages.

You can save your prospective employer's time and effort by emphasizing up front your skill sets and professional capabilities specific to the position you are seeking. Your organized and considerate approach will be appreciated and make you more memorable if you have what they're looking for.

The Two Parts of Resumés

Resumés are actually composed of two parts:

• The first part is the resumé which is all about you. It describes your accomplishments, experience, and background.
• The second part is the cover letter which is customized to each employer you are approaching. This letter contains more specific information that speaks directly to the employer's needs. In it you specific your accomplishments, experience, and skills and how they relate to the employer's needs. It should also have a Call To Action which which encourages the prospecitve employer to contact you.

Your Resumé will not get you a Job

Your resumé will help you get to the next step in the hiring process which could be a telephone interview, a screening interview, or a series of interviews with different managers, or any one or more of the preceding.

Locale Differences

Locale differences affect almost everything about a job. Marketing on the East Coast of the U.S. is different from doing that on the West Coast which different from doing it in England or Germany. Of particular interest are the laws, languages, and customs. Depending on the type of work you wish to do, your resume or CV must reflect these differences.

Format differences

Where the job is located and the type of job is often important when creating a resumé. The location and type determines whether you use the resumé format or the Curriculum Vitae (CV) format. They are quite different. (See Comparison between Professional Resumés & Curriculum Vitae (CVs).)

• In North America

  • A CV is used when applying for academic, educational, scientific-research positions, fellowships and grants. It includes a summary of your educational and academic backgrounds as well as teaching and research experience, publications, presentations, awards, honours, affiliations and other details.

  • A resumé is used for professional positions outside of academia and research. 

• Outside of North America
  • CVs are used for both academic and professionals positions and the resumé format is not used.

First Job

For a first job, give some details on your academic background, including schools, degrees or highest educational level, and awards like Summa Cum Laude. If you are in the top 25% or higher in your class, you can mention this. Also, if you are in a co-op program that combines work and academics, it may benefit you to use the functional resumé format since you have some experience.

If you have little or no job experience, you need to emphasis three things:

• Your skill set that is relevant to the position for which you are applying.
• Your accomplishments, including those that may not directly relate to the job position.
• Your extra-curricular activities, both in school and in the community. Mention things that you have done that get you noticed. For example, editor of paper, school sports announcer, blogger with number of followers, member of champion hockey team, help with the homeless.

Changing Careers

If you are changing your career or returning to the job market after many years, you have experiences that can be valuable to prospective employers. Your resumé needs to emphasis how your background would benefit your employer. For example, your experience may include skills such as budgeting, time management, sales, social interactions, and any skill that involves dealing with different people in many situations. Wise employers look for capable people in addition to just experience.

Improving Your Chances

There are a number of things that can help you create a successful resumé. Keep this list of items in mind. No resumé will satisfy all of these points, but tailoring your resumé to include as many of them as possible will improve your chances of getting that interview. 

• Contact info should be instantly accessible: provide your cell phone, primary and secondary email addresses, and physical address.
• Spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors are killers. Use grammar and spelling checkers.
• Be clear and concise.
• If you are multi-lingual, be sure to list all those in which you are fluent.
• Social Media involvement
  • List a blog - yours or others, to which you have contributed, especially if the blog and blog posts demonstrate a relevant skill set, an interest in, or discussion of, a subject related to the position sought. In any or all cases, your reasoning and communications abilities are on display; more so, if your posts have provoked comments
  • List your Twitter Id if you feel your tweets add value to your resumé presentation
  • Try to ensure that nothing embarrassing is posted about you on-line.
• Avoid run-on sentences and those longer than 20-25 words.
• As a rule, use the active voice (the cat ate the mouse) and avoid using the passive voice (the mouse was eaten by the cat) as it is longer and less forceful. Apply appropriate (business) action phrases & verbs but don't be excessive.
• Use bullet points to list things or numbered points for sequences.
• Depending on how many people apply, scanning software may be used to focus on certain words and phrases, skill sets and experiences. To increase your chances of getting through this filter, you may wish to add keywords associated with the position or industry.
• For emailed resumés, use sans-serif fonts (Arial, Tahoma, Verdana) in font sizes of 10-12 point as they are most often used for on-screen reading. If you remain unsure, check out what fonts the employer uses on-line.
• Write the same way that you speak so that if you meet your potential employer, they will recognize that you are the same person who wrote the resumé. This is a real consideration when asking others to write your resumé. Make sure they use language that reflects your personality, vocabulary and grammar.
• For paper-based communications, use serif fonts such as Times New Roman which is a business font.
• Uses a vocabulary suited to the position, industry, and company.
• Formatting matters. Make sure it is easy to find things that the reader in which they would be interested. Space your sentences and indent your paragraphs so that information is easy to skim and read
• For paper-based resumes and CVs, the feel of the paper is important, so use good quality paper.

Your First Resumé

This type of resumé is suitable for those with little or no work experience or for those who have been out of the job market for an extended period of time.

In such a case, directly referencing work experience may not be possible. However, almost everyone has a set of skills and accomplishments. So present your skills in a way that is meaningful to a potential employer. Also, by emphasizing your skill sets related to the position's requirements, you save your prospective employer's time. You will be more memorable if you provide employers with the information for which they are looking. They will appreciate your consideration.

Scannable

Well-known companies get hundreds, if not thousands, of resumés a month. They use resumé-scanning software to go through all these submissions to filter for those resumés/CVs that would be interesting to the companies you are contacting. Remember, if your resume passes the filtering, you still must impress the human-being behind the hiring.

There are two main things to keep in mind about making your resumé scannable:

• The format of a resumé should be simple, clear and somewhat standardized. Avoid things such as fancy fonts, italics, underlining, embedded graphics, and most things that are not textual in nature.
• Scanning software looks for keywords in your resumé. These keywords take 2 forms:
  • General category keywords such as chemist/chemistry, programmer/programming, sales/account executive, video/movie producer, etc.
  • Specific keywords such as bioluminescence, C++/Java, medical devices, documentary, etc.

These keywords should be used in context so the resumé reads coherently. Typically, there should be one or more specific keywords for each general keyword. When you use general and specific keywords together, they back each other up and make you seem "more real".

Historically, there used to be a section called "Keywords". It is no longer needed and only clutters up your resumé. This section is often ignored since it is too easy to "pack" irrelevant words into this section.

Assessment Criteria

The following are the current review criteria used to judge professional resumés:

• Clear and well formatted
• Ensure spelling and grammar is correct
• Clearly state the objective of the resumé
• Highlight relevant skills and experience
• List and describe accomplishments 
• Be concise and to the point
• Use appropriate vocabulary
• Use active verbs
• Describe any relevant social media and networking
• Have a LinkedIn profile, particularly if you have employment history
• Make scannable

Legal issues

In North America, the resumé/CV should not mention age, race, gender, disabilities, family status, or anything else not relevant to your fulfilling the employer's needs. For example, your date of birth, or the date of your graduation need not be given. For this reason also, you may choose not to include a photo or video. In some cases, you may need to mention one of these attributes. For example, applying for the government's small business loans to minorities may require that you mention your race to qualify.