<p>Presenting a potential employer with your resume can be a bit nerve-racking. This article gives some interesting advice on how to provide employers with an impressive and effective resume. </p>
<p>Eliminating vague descriptions and excessive bullet points may prove useful in presenting your specific skills. But what about limiting your resume to one page altogether or omitting any high school achievements? </p>
<p>How closely could you follow these tips and what others could you add to the list to ensure your resume stands out?</p>
<p>What a weird list. I don’t know why the writer chose to mix random stylistic points (the list of style tips is practically infinite) with larger, conceptual items (like not referring to high school accomplishments).</p>
<p>Just thinking how great it would be if grandma DID know Microsoft Word…</p>
<p>The point of the article is to tailor your resume to the company to which you are applying. WOW gaming is not a bad line for a computer job–not so hot for chef job. </p>
<p>Adding that last usual line about outside interests (I love to read, fish, knit, cook, cultivate earthworms, eat earthworms) can be very good although many applicants leave it off these days. I wouldn’t. If you are applying to a job by the water and truly do love to fish (as an example) it may give an employer something to talk about or an idea if they may be hiring someone who will be happy living in the area. However an employer in Minnesota may not want to see surfing as someones favorite sport. So be judicious.</p>
<p>A one-page resume is good–unless you are a super-duper person and really need two pages to show that. Paper is cheap. Just make sure all the important stuff that matters to the company you are applying to is on page one. But if they make it past page one and are on page two and you still have something to say? I’d say write it down. The thinking has been that “nobody gives you a second glance after page one” but if you need to build your case for hire and it takes two pages–take them. Don’t leave your sparkling qualities for the interview since you may never GET an interview.</p>
<p>High school stuff is a goner–unless you just graduated from HS and that’s all you’ve got. Or saved the world in some way while you were there (but then we’d probably know about it already).</p>
<p>4 and 5 fit perfectly together. One says “be specific” and the other says “use shrewd wording”.
What it does say is that a two page resume from a twenty something is probably not happening. Simply because the majority of 20 somethings haven’t done anything to warrant a second page of resume.</p>
<p>It all depends upon at what point you are writing a resume. The author is writing for recent college grads. HS accomplishments may more may not be relevant depending upon what they are and what the role you are seeking is.</p>
<p>If your best accomplishment is from HS, you had better put it on there. The rest of this is not novel in any way.</p>
<p>“Such as” and “utilize” scream I want to come off smart in the worst way please hire me k thanks bye.</p>
<p>First of all, such as doesn’t even sound rather sophisticated (at least to the point where it sounds pretentious). Second of all, there is a genuine difference between “such as” and “like” and they are not always interchangeable. Like is for comparison, such as is for inclusion, or listing.</p>
<p>For example: Administrative duties such as filing, organization, etc. (bad description, I know, but not the point). It would be incorrect to switch it out with “like.” </p>
<p>Personally, I like a lot of non-traditional formats because they allow more freedom to move more of the important/impactful information near the top of page 1 … however, you want to be pretty sure the reader will be OK with the non-typical approach (or better yet prefer it).</p>
<ol>
<li>Microsoft Word
Yes, of course you know how to use Word. So does your grandmother. You can leave this “skill” off the list.
<snip></snip></li>
</ol>
<p>Do you know how many job descriptions <em>require</em> the applicant to know Word, Excel, and Powerpoint? If we are playing the “apply online and attach resume game,” the robot is actually looking for those specific words … Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. They better be there!</p>
<p>I’m skimming lots of job descriptions these days as my newly minted grad is job hunting. Today was great – two (count them 2) quality interviews!</p>
<p>cpn55 is absolutely correct. These search companies are running tools that are looking for specific terms in your resume. The number of hits that match the job posting matter.</p>
<p>I do think that if you went to high school in the same area where you are applying for a job, that you should mention the high school name, and city/state, year of graduation to show that you are local. Employers generally like to hire local, because an employee with roots in the vicinity is more likely to stay.</p>
<p>My grandmother does NOT know how to use Word. Actually, many people aged 50 and up are incapable of effectively using Microsoft software. So…yeah, it’s a skill, especially if you’re competing against older candidates.</p>
<p>Also, I agree that “such as” and “utilize” are not snobby smart kid words. They are words belonging to any college graduate worth his weight.</p>
<p>*Edit: Actually, my grandmother is afraid of computers, so she doesn’t computer programs or the internet. :)</p>
<p>@DiscipulusBonus some of those sections look out of place (I’ve never seen a resume with languages/programming languages on the far left) so idk if I would use it. I found some more traditional LaTeX templates that are much easier to read and still look beautiful, and I use one of those templates for my own resume. Plus you can put \LaTeX in it.</p>
<p>lol. Only the ones who don’t work in an office. The rest of us have been upgrading our software skills every year since 1982.</p>
<p>As a professor, I’m more likely to run into college students who are clueless about office software. E.g., they can’t format a header, can’t paste a URL into a document as plain text, can’t figure out how to un-center a block of text, don’t understand that the 6pts of space after a paragraph can be changed, etc. And that’s just Word . . .</p>
<p>I’d ignore Huff post blog ‘articles’. The blog posts are of uneven quality and not worth the link. Thise are usually not written by professionals, writers or reporters. I also dislike the 5 this, and 10 that headers, and as you see it doesn’t work well here being so subjective and the advice here is of dubious quality and not consistent importance.</p>