Best Resume Formats, Tricks & Techniques
A resume is the first impression of your personality.It is the biggest oxymoron but your this mute document is your first speech to the recruiter.Often when a recruiter is scanning millions of resume applications, the last thing she wants is confusion and mismatch ofinformation.Entire decision of your career is dependent on the 6-seconds which the recruiter has to scan a resume.In 6 seconds, a recruiter cannot understand each and every line.To make the recruiter’s job easy and assure your shortlisting in these 6 seconds, please note that giving timeline claritybecomes crucial.Apart from other things like choosing the right resume format, correct resume template design and bolding importantinformation, mentioning proper dates and location of your work-places and other sections still stand important.Dates give instant clarity around your number of years of working experience and your professional stability.If you have a work experience of more than 3 years in all the companies you have worked with, don’t you think it will build abrilliant impression on the recruiter if you properly mention the same.Similarly, mentioning the location of the work-place in your resume is also of paramount importance because your worklocation plays an important role in shortlisting decisions.This is due to the fact that the recruiter might get a feel of what kind of culture you have an exposure to.There are a few ways you can show the dates and location on the resume. As we know, there is no right or wrong technique.But whatever resume format you choose for dates and location should be consistent across all sections and render more clarityto the recruiter.
Often we get clients with more than 25 years of work experience.Many times there are projects which they have handled which are explained extensively.Clients really want that each and every word should be there from the original resume given by them.But we know that industry does not accept a resume which has more than 2-pages.This is only because no one has time to read stories.You have to be crisp and clear rather than detailed and long.But there is a trade-off between what information to include and still keep the length of the resume short.We at Hiration Inc. have built an online resume builder tool which takes care of the resume format and resume template issues,sorts the spacing problem which you usually face in the word-document and you can quickly see a pdf version of what you havemade to understand if the information has to be compressed.Once the pdf displays 2-pages, you are almost sorted. And if the pdf file is coming out to be 5-pages then you know thatinformation is to be summarized.We usually have to compress a 6-pages resume into a 2-pages one. We follow some general rules which you can follow tocompress the information into a 2-pages resume format:-1. Try to combine your one-liner bullet points which imply a cause-effect relationshipExample:• Deployed MS Office Suite• Generated reports w.r.t sales revenue, cost per resource, etc.This can be rephrased as:-• Generated reports via MS Office Suite pertaining to sales revenue, cost per resource, etc.
2. Keep the professional summary for not more than 2-pages3. If you have to say 10 technical skills, then rather than allocating a line for each one, it is better to put them like a paragraphseparated by bullets.Example:• Co Model Emulation Environment Set up• Processor Verification/Validation/FPGA Prototyping• SOC Verification/Validation/FPGA Prototyping• DFT Verification • System Verilog • RTL Coding• Performance Model Study & Validation• Logic Designing • Power Management
- Hardware Platform Design
This can be rephrased as:-
- Co Model Emulation Environment Set up • Processor Verification/Validation/FPGA Prototyping• SOC Verification/Validation/FPGA Prototyping • DFT Verification • System Verilog • RTL Coding• Performance Model Study & Validation • Logic Designing • Power Management • Hardware Platform DesignThe rephrased one looks better, renders clarity, saves space and appears to be more professional.4. Keep dates, location and company aligned in 1 line using left-hand side and right-hand sideExample:Peter PottsNew York, USAJun ’15 – Dec ‘17
It can be rephrased as:-Peter Potts New York, USA | Jun ’15 – Dec ‘17
Similarly, there are many other ways of compressing the information. What goes is a little bit of research and common sense.Put yourself in recruiter’s shoes and take the decision of how you would like to see it.Best of Luck!