I’m in the midst of wading through about 100 resumes for a few job openings we have, which is in a highly technical area. I have found a few good ones, but my pile of not so good ones is much, much bigger. None of the ones I’ve gotten are stupid, they are all nicely formatted and spell checked, but here are a few higher level things I’d like to see.
It is good to put the type of job you are seeking. It is even better if this objective has something to do with the jobs posted. However, it is not good to give objectives about advancing your career, having a good time, etc. I’m happy to hear that you want to make more money for our company, but you are just out of school and our company has tens of billions of dollars in revenue, so you had best show me something about how you intend to do it. Otherwise, let us figure it out.
I’m glad that you read the job description, and care enough about submitting your resume to modify the objectives to match what we are looking for. However, you might want to see if there is anything in your experience relevant to this job. If not, I’m not going to be very convinced.
If you are at a school with lots of students, and they give you a resume template, throw it out. One very well respected university seems to give its MS students such a template, and I have 30 at least resumes that look exactly the same. Too much choice means no choice. Exactly one had something in addition - that one got looked at.
I’m in engineering and CS, so a list of tools and languages you have experience with is very helpful. What would be even more helpful is a line or two about how you used the tool or language. Class project? Internship? Looked at the manual? Looked at the website? We fully expect to train new people, even prefer to, but this helps.
This is in no way a rant. I worry that some great candidate is hidden by a bad resume. There is nothing I’d like better than to hire you, have you help us, and get back to more fun pursuits.
Hiring people, other suggestions?