8 Tips and Tricks for Writing the Best Resume No Matter Your Experience

8 Tips to Write the Best Resume to Wow Your Future Employer

Writing the best resume can be daunting. It’s difficult to know what will appeal to recruiters and resume scanners, look great, and describe your experience to a T.

1. Introduce yourself. Including personal information is important if recruiters want to get in contact with you, but also include a quick highlight of your strengths and what career you are in or looking to get into. 
2. Use bullet points. When recruiters are glancing over resumes, they don’t like coming across ones that are difficult to read. They want to quickly get a summary of your experience. When describing your work experience or what you are involved in, use bullet points about a sentence long, and not paragraphs.
3. Make it visually appealing. If you are an engineer, a black and white traditional resume is best. But if you are in a creative industry like communications or arts, let your resume reflect your creativity. The style shouldn’t be overwhelming and you do not need a picture, but play with (readable) fonts and colors to stand out. Just remember, it needs to be readable in both electronic and printed format, especially because many are printed black and white. My favorite site to use for creating resumes is Canva which is super user friendly.
4. Show rather than tell. Not only can you customize your resume to include keywords and experiences certain jobs may be looking for, but it’s also important to quantify your experience into proof of your effectiveness. If you’ve increased an account’s social media following by 560% or earned 13,000 media impressions through a post you contributed to, include that! They want to see what value you would bring to their company.
5. Write about things you could easily talk about in an interview. Obviously don’t lie, but also make an effort to include projects or work that if they asked you about it, you could describe your contribution and why it was a success in great detail. 
6. Only include relevant experience on your resume. If you worked at a snow cone stand in high school, that’s probably not going to help your resume. But, if you were a supervisor at a J. Crew, that shows excellent leadership skills and experience. Additionally, it’s not necessary to include your high school or your GPA on your resume, unless it makes you especially stand out (ie. graduated top 10 in your class)
7. Order your resume chronologically, but also with the best and most relevant experience first. For example, your major and minor should come before the underwater basket weaving club you a part of in college. Additionally, your most relevant and recent work experience should be first, with the most description and details included. Having an internship at a prominent company is much more impressive than your summer as a server!
8. Format it correctly. Your resume should be in PDF form, with your first name, last name, and the word ‘resume’ as the title (FirstLastResume.pdf). PDF is the most universal format, and will not change appearance from system to system. It’s higher resolution than JPEG, and Word documents tend to morph by how they are opened. Including your first and last name will make it easy for recruiters to store and find your resume because they have tens to hundreds of other resumes, too.

Resumes are crucial when starting out your career and displaying your skills and experience. Research how to best format it, have a friend review it for errors, and update it as you gain experience! Remember, you want to prove you are the best candidate for any position you apply for, so display that through quantitative proof and efficient descriptions of your experience.

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