Does Your Resume Follow These Guidelines, Young Jobseeker?

By Deborah Federico

Gone in sixty seconds. Recruiters spend less than a minute reviewing your resume. With a stack of resumes to review, recruiters naturally want to make their workload easier, tossing bad resumes right off the bat.  Reasons for your resume to be quickly tossed into the “No” pile: Typos, misspellings, mismatched fonts, a sloppy appearance.  Even a resume that’s too text heavy or runs onto two pages will get thrown into the discard pile.

Every time I teach my class on resume writing, I always start the lecture with the question, What is the goal of a resume?  Is it “to get a job?” as most students will answer? To them, I say, “No, that’s not it. Eventually, someone guesses the real goal of a resume: to get an interview.  I make the marketing analogy that the resume is an advertisement about you, and you need to make the most of that 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper. Sell yourself to the employer by convincing them that you’re the best candidate to bring in for the interview.

So, what can you do to increase the chances that your resume will be read by the recruiter?  Follow my Lucky 13 tips outlined below, and you will produce a winning resume that not only gains the attention of the recruiter, but also garners his or her admiration.  Pretty soon your phone will be ringing with calls from recruiters inviting you in for an interview. READ MORE