How to Write a Resume to Get Hired

Required Headlines (you can add more)

(this is from a resume session geared towards college/high school students)

Contact

• Phone and email minimum
• Some people like to add an objective along with this. Not necessary unless it is concise and matches job description. Remember that the top of the page is prime real estate; don’t waste it.

Education

• Most important for students to put this at top. Later in life you can remove the year of graduation.
• Can put GPA only if it is considerably high or if you graduated with honors.

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Experience

• If you tutored kids or babysat, that’s overall experience, included in here
  • If you did paid internships, that’s work experience which you can separate out if you want/have enough variety.
• If you have a bunch of burger king jobs and then a job that eclipses those in expertise, you can leave out the burger king jobs.
• Talk about results of the things you did at each job to show efficacy of your work
• Personal projects can be a separate heading if you want/have enough.

Accomplishments (not required)

• you can put AP scholar awards and relevant school awards here.

 
Skills

• Important for STEM jobs especially

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Be careful about

​First person and tense

• you shouldn’t use first person
• get used to writing like “recent grad from econ program, interested in position in finance”
• kind of a stupid rule that we all have to deal with.
• Make sure if you pick present or past tense you are consistent across the resume.
• Usually past tense is more temporally accurate, so I recommend it.

Use of color

• make sure that it is not too much if at all. It should be easy to read.

Graphics

• not necessary unless germane to job

Page count

• you shouldn’t go over 2 pages.
• If you have more stuff, that’s ok, take it out and put it in another document.
  • You can switch information out to better match the job description for each job you apply for, creating multiple different resumes.
  • Great tactic for multi talented people like yourself

Hobbies

• if they are germane to job like building a computer for a cs job, great!
• If they are "travel", "surf", "help with boy scouts", etc, they don’t add much information and should be taken out.

Grammatical/Spelling Errors

• If they have 2 good candidates, one with typos, one without, they will pick the one without.
• Have parent and friend proofread.

Strange Formatting

• many HR departments use applicant tracking system which extracts sections from paper and presents output to hr officer.
• If there's weird formatting (textboxes, vertical text, excessive graphics), output may be garbled.

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Lying

• people lie about which schools they go to, or their major most often. Sometimes they lie about other things.
• Very easy to catch lying about facts. Don't do it.
• Stretching the truth (lying about perceived extent) is much harder to catch but still be careful.

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Keep in mind

Include hard skills, not soft skills

• Hard skills are tangible:
  • typing, writing, developing, coding; these are good to list on resume
• Soft skills are less tangible:
  • good with people, negotiate, create a meeting, people-person, motivating.
  • These tend to be overused.

Keep clean, white space.

• Avoid large paragraphs. Use bullets.
• Usually they spend 30 seconds on each resume, starting with eyeballing the top.
  • So you have to get the message out at the top of the paper.
  • White space should be used to not occlude this info.
• If it is apparent that the candidate doesn’t meet qualifications or they can't figure out if they do (more common), they move on.

Remember who is reading.

• Is the company casual or formal?
  • You can adjust language and graphical style.
• Are you starting with HR/applicant system, or did someone ask to see your resume?
  • You can be more flexible with the rules with the latter.

Cover letters

• Some people write cover letters. In the first round, nobody reads them.
• However, if you make it to the second round, the hiring manager might read them.
  • Now they must be perfect.
• Ideally, they are about half notebook page long.
  
• Something like: “dear employer, please find my enclosed resume. I’m interested and experienced for this role. I await your response.” although much less generic haha

Online presence

• Employers by law aren’t supposed to check social media
  
  • but they can if they can prove that what they find is related to hiring process.
    
  • Sort of a strange legal grey area
• They buy social media aggregators that crawl the internet for information about you and present it in one unified set of pages.
  
  • Scary stuff.
    
  • Consider that what you are posting on your accounts that is public is going to be seen by HR.
• They will also check your criminal background and social security.
  
  • Any criminal background will make getting a job infinitely harder
    
  • (just ask someone who got out of jail :( )

Stay tuned for my information on interviews! Remember the preceding information are simply guidelines provided to me by a hiring officer at my company. If you break some of these rules, make sure you understand why.