Having sifted through many resumes over the years, I agree with Brett Terpstra’s advice:
- Customize (or at least supplement) your resume. If you’re going to link to a web resume, it’s awesome if you make it a unique url tailored to the job you’re applying for.
- Don’t list 10-year-old, deprecated technologies under your current skills. Your awards in COBOL programming are actually a turnoff when listed under skills instead of achievements.
- Have a skills section. Your job as manager of a restaurant franchise location is less interesting to me than your current capabilities.
- Put that skills section at the top. You know, before your extra-curricular activities.
- Make your resume a well-formatted PDF, not a DOCX file.
That last one is apparently controversial, because many places require you to send in a Word file. But I personally dread when I see a .doc in an email, because I’m never sure how it’s going to open, or how it’s going to look — particularly on mobile. I don’t even have Word installed on my main machine, so every time I open one of these files, I get warnings from Pages or TextEdit.
Creating a custom URL for your resume is smart, and shows me you know what you’re doing. It will also tell you that I actually clicked through.
