My brother is starting out on his career, and was looking for some advice on writing a good resume.  I dropped him an email with some hints I’ve learned from reading and writing resumes over the past several years.  I thought sharing them might be useful… if not, I at least have my thoughts captured here for posterity

Keys to writing a good resume:

1. Hook them early. Make sure the first few lines of the resume communicate enough about you that they’ll want to read more.
2. Short and sweet. One page resumes used to be the only ones read by hiring managers, but now I’m seeing more and more two page resumes. A resume can be one or two pages, but don’t try to cram two pages into one, or stretch one page into two. Keep it tight, concise, but don’t sell yourself short.
3. Focus on the job. This is the hardest for me to do, but it is important to tailor your resume to the job for which you are applying. Make sure you highlight aspects of your work, education, or volunteer experience that have direct application to the job. Move these items to the top of the list where possible.
4. Demonstrated competence. Make sure you can back up what you say on your resume. Don’t say you are a great web programmer if you don’t know how to code in HTML (and probably by hand at that), or don’t know what AJAX is. With that said, make sure you really capture the areas you are great at. If you are a good leader, a good teacher, a quick learner, detail oriented, a good coordinator, or possess good organizational skills, make sure you don’t leave those out.
5. Spell check. Then grammar check. Then have someone peer review it. Then have someone else peer review it. Then spell check again. Think of it this way: the only impression many people make on me is the resume I read. Wouldn’t you want to put your best foot forward if that was your only shot at a job? Spelling errors, grammatical errors, and inconsistent formatting are key things that tell me the author is not a detail oriented person. I may still interview them, if the position doesn’t require attention to detail. But I don’t typically hire sanitation engineers.

Filed under: Leadership