It’s almost a science. It’s certainly the most frequently asked question that a recruiter will get asked. There can be a lot of conflicting advice out there. Some of that advice is good and some of that advice is not so good.
What am I talking about? Resumes and what the ideal one should look like of course.
There isn’t a straight forward answer as each individual will l have their own personal likes and dislikes about how they wish to represent themselves and that’s OK. What isn’t OK is missing the fundamentals and alarmingly, as recruiters we see this all the time. There is no excuse for a crappy resume!
Below is a list of must haves:
- Contact details – Name, email and phone mobile (LinkedIn link optional)
- Summary/personal statement/overview – call it whatever you want but this is a short punchy succinct paragraph that sums up you and your career leaning and-or direction. This is often the most challenging component
- Education/Qualifications – preferably tertiary
- Skills/attributes – hard and soft skills but include technology
- Employment
History
- Company name – include a brief description of the company – this is really important information for the reader
- Dates of employment – month and year
- Position title
- Reported to
- Role responsibilities and achievements
REPEAT but don’t go too far back ie last 12 years. Roles previous to this can be summarised as “Roles held previously to YEAR” only need to include Company Name & Position
- Additional
information – this section
is reserved for any relevant adhoc accomplishments ie:
- additional courses of study,
- anything that you may have published,
- speaking gigs at conferences,
- Board/committee engagements,
- Memberships
- Voluntary work
- Referees – do not list names and contact details as it is critical that you have control over your referee details, just add that “referees’ details are available upon request”
Please Note (NB) if you really have to use acronyms in your resume, you do so at the risk of the reader not understanding what they mean. Do not assume that all acronyms are universally known, they are not.
And that’s it! Simple and clear. Not War & Peace, but not under-representing yourself either. Just make sure you do complete a spell check before you PDF it and that includes common errors like “form” instead of “from” and there are a lot of “Mangers” out there rather than “Managers”
Good luck!
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