You want your resume to catch the attention of an employer, and make them interested in talking to you. Employers receive many resumes, and usually spend only seconds skimming them. Make your important information easy for them to see:

  • Use bullets rather than writing in paragraphs.
  • Be as specific as possible about your skills and qualifications.
  • Use headings to clearly organize your content.

There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all resume!

If you’re considering a variety of career options and applying for many different kinds of positions, you’ll need to customize each resume you submit. It’s important to tailor your resume to the particular position as much as possible. Incorporate language from the description into your headings and action bullets as much as possible.

Resumes are not a list of everything you’ve ever done.

Use the job description to guide what you include on your resume, and what you leave out. Employers are interested in what you’ve done recently. Include only experiences that you’ve had since you’ve been in college, don’t include your high school education or activities.

It’s not necessary to list all of the courses you’ve ever taken. If an employer really cares about your coursework, they’ll ask for transcripts. If you have coursework that is directly relevant to the position, you could include that as a bullet point in your “Education” section.

Identify Your Transferable Skills

Even if you think that your work experience isn’t related to the position you’re applying for, chances are you’ve learned skills that would be useful and developed in almost any work setting.

Don’t just list the duties that you performed. Be as specific and results oriented as possible; using numbers is particularly effective. Your involvement in extra-curricular activities, volunteer work and work experience while in college demonstrates that you’re able to manage your time effectively, and balance multiple tasks at once.

Resume Formatting Essentials

There are no rules about what a resume ought to look like, or what it should or shouldn’t include. It all depends on the job you’re applying for, the kind of employer, and the image of yourself that you want to project. But, there are some general formatting rules you should always remember:

  • For a recent college undergraduate applying for an entry-level position, stick to ONE PAGE . (Exceptions are for federal or education resumes, which tend to be longer because of additional material required.)
  • One-inch margins (all the way around) are standard for resumes.
  • Be consistent with your format throughout the document. Use the same line spacing, font, font size, etc.
  • Avoid italics and underlining, since they can be misread by optical scanners that are used by many employers for scanning resumes into electronic database systems. Use ALL CAPS and bold to make your important words and phrases stand out.
  • Choose a font that is easy to read. Good fonts include: Arial, Times New Roman, Palatino, Tahoma, and Verdana. Use no less than 11-point for smaller fonts; larger fonts can be easily read at 10 point.
  • Make headers and contact information larger than body text.
  • DON’T use templates or resume programs to create your resume. Anyone who spends time looking at lots of resumes can spot them a mile away.
  • Use action verbs to begin bullet points whenever possible. This way, an employer will easily see your skills (analyzed, organized, wrote, solved) just by skimming over the first part of each line. Take a look at the action verbs list found later in this section for more ideas on what kinds of language to use in your resume.