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Build the Resume Employers Want
Matt Longino has read student resumes on college and university campuses throughout the nation. He has pored over pages of bond, vellum, and plain printer paper in hotel rooms, airports, and airplanes. He has seen faxed resumes, e-mailed resumes, and resumes posted on the Internet. Very little surprises him.
It’s much the same for Stephanie Calhoun and Seth Feit. Like Longino, they’re familiar with the ways students describe their skills and themselves. They know how to quickly scan paper and electronic documents, to pull out the ones they’d like to examine more closely, and to toss the others aside.
Longino, a college recruiter for GTE Corp. in Irving, Texas, says he looks at the education portion of a resume first.
“I look for the degree, the major, and the graduation date,” he says. “And, of course, the GPA. It’s kind of a lump sum of things that I look for.”
Calhoun, college relations manager at JC Penney Co. Inc. in Dallas, Texas, says she looks at the experience section first.
“I look to see if the student has retail experience,” she says, adding that she then checks out the graduation date and the GPA.
Feit, corporate staffing manager at America Online in Fairfax, Virginia, says he looks first for skills and experience.
All three recruiters agree that aside from containing the education, skills, and experience they seek, a resume needs to communicate those elements clearly and be free of glaring grammatical and spelling errors.
Getting started
If you’re just beginning the process of building your resume, you’ll need to construct a framework first.
“A resume is like a final term paper,” says Jeff Nardo, career services coordinator at Coastal Carolina Community College in Jacksonville, North Carolina. “You have to put in the same energy, attention to detail, and focus.”
Your resume should begin with a heading that includes your name, address, telephone number, and, in most cases, e-mail address. If you’ll be leaving campus soon, be sure to provide a way for employers to reach you after you’ve moved from your dorm room or apartment. If you’re not sure where you’ll be living, it’s best to include both your campus contact information and contact information for your parents or a friend who isn’t planning to move and who won’t mind taking and forwarding messages.
“I often tell students to sign up for a free e-mail account that can travel with them,” says Marcia Merrill, career adviser at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, pointing out that most campus e-mail accounts end within a certain time after a student graduates.
When you’re choosing that e-mail address, make sure it appears professional.
“I don’t feel comfortable responding to ‘sexylegs,’ ” Calhoun says. “Keep it simple.”
If you have your own web site, you may also want to include its URL on your resume. But both recruiters and career counselors stress that you must make sure your site contains only professional information and images.
Objectively speaking
After you’ve assembled your heading information, you’ll need to find a focus for your resume. One good way of doing that is to write an objective that clearly tells the employer the sort of work you’re hoping to do.
Merrill advises students to avoid writing grandiose “philosophy-of-life” objectives.
“Some students look at the objective as a statement of what you want to do with your life,” she says. “Employers get a lot of ‘To continue learning and growing in a nurturing environment.’ You can probably say it in a different way.”
“We like to see some kind of objective or summary statement,” Feit says. “The more specific it is, the better. Then we’re able to route the resume to the appropriate people.”
Nardo tells students to tailor their objectives to each employer they’re targeting—and to each job they’re seeking.
“The objective is like the thesis statement for a term paper,” he says. “In it, you’re trying to prove your knowledge of a particular area.”
Education, of course
After you’ve found a focus, you’ll likely want to tell employers what you’ve learned. That means you’ll need a section for your education. You may also want to include related course work in that category or in a separate section directly beneath it.
At minimum, the education section should include your degree, when it was earned or is expected, and what college or university you attended or are attending. Many job seekers also include their GPA.
“Usually a 3.0 or better should go on the resume,” Merrill says, adding that if employers don’t see a GPA listed on your resume, they’ll assume it’s less than 3.0.
Feit and Calhoun both say they won’t immediately toss aside a resume listing a lower GPA, but they won’t keep it much longer unless it shows strong experience.
“We don’t cut you off if you don’t have a 3.0,” Calhoun says.
Merrill adds that the education category is a good place to mention if you’re on the dean’s list or have received other academic honors.
“Some students have a separate category for honors,” she says. “Others just list honors with their education. If you’ve made dean’s list but that’s your only honor, put it under education.”
After the education section, many student job seekers include a section listing courses that are related to the job they’re seeking.
“It’s kind of annoying if you list every class you’ve ever taken,” Feit says. “If you’re looking for a position as a software developer, then list software development courses.”
Feit says that he doesn’t think a course work section is always necessary, but it can be helpful, “especially for people who don’t have much meat on their resume.”
For most students, the education section should precede the experience section.
“For me, it’s easier if education is placed near the top of the page,” Longino says.
But not all employers agree.
Calhoun says she likes to see the section listing a student’s work experience placed above the education category.
“I would prefer experience to appear on top,” she says. “I already know you’re in school.”
Wherever the section appears on the resume, employers will be looking at it closely.
“I’ve seen a lot of resumes that really don’t have anything on them,” Longino says. “The students don’t describe their accomplishments. They might just say, ‘rang up sales and talked to customers.’ Instead of saying ‘rang up sales,’ say ‘responsible for generating 50,000 sales transactions in three months’ or something like that.”
“You have to quantify and qualify,” adds Nardo. “You can’t just say you handled money, for instance. Say ‘handled in excess of $5,000 per day.’ Then qualify it. If you sold clothes, how well did you do it? Did you get an award? A bonus? A raise? Measure how much you did and explain how well you did it.”
Longino adds that students shouldn’t hesitate to include summer and part-time work experience that doesn’t initially seem to be related to the position they’re seeking.
“Students are way too negative about their fast-food experience,” he says. “It’s how you position it that matters. Customer service is a wonderful training ground. Try to identify how what you did fits into the corporate world and play up that experience.”
Calhoun, who hires specifically for retail positions, agrees that customer service is key.
“Even if you were a telemarketer, you still have experience in customer service,” she says.
If you haven’t completed an internship or worked in a job in or out of your field, Feit recommends including a project completed for an upper-level class.
“Describe it like a work experience,” he says. “But be honest about what it is. You don’t want to snow someone into thinking it was a full-time job for two years.”
Nardo, who often counsels students who are transitioning from other careers or returning to the workplace after raising their children, says that sometimes volunteer and home-management activities can be used as experience.
“The challenge is to identify what’s relevant,” he says.
“You could be punctual and pay your bills,” he says. “You could refinish your bathroom in your home and follow well-defined instructions.”
Other categories
Recruiters and career counselors agree that not every resume needs to look exactly the same. Different people need to emphasize things in different ways.
Nardo says he sometimes recommends a key skills or special competencies section, to be placed high on the resume, usually just below the objective.
“It’s like a table of contents or an outline,” he says. “You’re saying, ‘I’m going to tell you more in the experience section.”
Special skills, such as fluency in a foreign language or proficiency in specific computer programs, can be placed beneath the experience category as well, as can a listing of honors and awards.
All three recruiters say they don’t mind seeing a list of activities—as long as the student can relate them to the job.
“A lot of people get carried away with awards,” Calhoun says. “If you were homecoming queen, I don’t really need to know that.”
Feit says he likes to see leadership experience, even if it doesn’t seem related to the job.
“Having an office in a fraternity or a volunteer organization is good,” he says. “It shows an ability to balance. Sports are nice, too.”
Adds Longino, “There’s nothing that says ‘I can organize my time’ better than the resume of a student who is a collegiate athlete and also has a good GPA.”
Putting it on paper…or online
Once you’ve organized your information into categories, you’ll need to make sure it can be read easily and can withstand the scrutiny of an electronic scanning system and, in some cases, a trip through cyberspace.
If you’re planning to send your resume by “snail mail” or hand it to a recruiter at a job fair, make sure it appears clean and pleasing to the eye. In most cases, it should be confined to one page of white or off-white paper, although some employers in some fields, such as education and counseling psychology, expect longer resumes.
“I’ve seen some hot pinks,” says Calhoun, who still receives about 80 percent of the resumes she reads on paper. “That will not get your resume read faster.”
“I’ve had resumes coming in that were blue and purple,” adds Longino, who receives about 75 percent of the resumes he reads on paper. “It’s hard on the eyes.”
A brightly colored resume can also make it hard for electronic scanning systems to pick out the correct words, and could put you out of the running for a job you want and are qualified for.
Calhoun says the quality of paper doesn’t matter to her a great deal, as long as the information is clearly presented and shows the experience she’s seeking.
If you’re planning to fax your resume, the same advice holds true. If you’re e-mailing your resume, or directly entering it into an employer’s web site, remember to keep it as simple as possible.
“In the technical age, content is king,” says Feit, explaining that AOL receives 90 percent of its resumes through its web site. “Formatting doesn’t matter as much.”
No matter how you plan to submit your resume, make sure that you’ve proofread it carefully and asked several other people to do the same.
“It’s really important to remember that spellcheck does not work for grammar,” Merrill says, adding that the same applies for homonyms. “If you have ‘their’ instead of ‘there,’ it won’t come up on spellcheck.”
Merrill tells students to have a career services staff member review their resume before they send it off.
“Make sure you’ve spelled everything right, especially the company’s name,” advises Calhoun. “And keep in mind what a resume is: a summary of your job qualifications.”
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