Tell Me About Writing A Resume - What Format Is Best?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Whilst searching through internal postings today, I noticed that they’ve posted an opening for The Job I Want. I’m not talking about The Job I Guess I Could Be Happy With… it’s the bright shiny Job I Really Really Want, complete with potential raise.

Trouble is, my resume has been neglected for nearly four years and is in desperate need of a makeover. I’ve browsed a few sites, but it seems like everyone and their headhunter seems to have a different concept of What Makes The Best Resume EVER.

A little background, in case you’re curious… About a year ago, my home department loaned me out to a cross-functional project team as something they call a Subject Matter Expert. It’s a fancy title for a neverending series of odd jobs, but basically I’m involved the design and implementation of a tool that is usually described with the kind of buzzwords that cause spontanous combustion in marketing gurus (words like synergy and customer-oriented and tend to be thrown around a lot). Anyway, I’ve discovered I’m actually quite good at it and would like to continue doing this sort of thing.

Thing is, the project wraps up in a couple of months and I’m about to get dragged kicking and screaming to my old job if I don’t find a new job in time. It’s not a bad job, but I did it for four years and was bored out of my mind when they presented me this opportunity on a silver platter. Needless to say, the thought of going back ranks somewhere between poking my eyes out with rusty forks and giving birth to quintuplets sans painkillers (I’m not all that enthused about either option, BTW).

So, Dopers, I reach to you in my hour of need. Is there a particular format that you prefer when writing/reading a resume? (achievements? bullet-point skills summary? full job descriptions? some or all of the above?) Also, I’m hoping to get specific suggestions in terms of presenting work history, since I’ve got both a permanent job title and an acting title. Has anyone had to do this before? If so, how?

My entire future is hanging in the balance here. No pressure. :slight_smile:

2

I wouldn’t stray too far from a chronological list of jobs you’ve held. People seem to expect that, and ISTM that they are likely to throw out resumes that aren’t what they expect. If you don’t give a chronological list of jobs and when you held them, they may think you’re trying to hide something, like big gaps or a bunch of jobs you held for a very short time.

3

I’m an IT manager. I prefer as few pages as possible, 11 or 12-point Times, contact info centered at the top and possibly bolded.

Then a one sentence objective that relates specifically to the position at hand, avoiding phrases like “to provide excellent customer service.”

Then a (concise!) bulleted list of post-secondary positions with the following info: Employer, final title, dates, top three accomplishments.

Then a (concise!) list of post-secondary educational accomplishments and/or certifications, with the following info: Institution, degree/cert received, major, and date received.

Pimply-faced youth may substitute a (concise!) list of functional accomplishments if their relevant work experience isn’t extensive, and flush out the educational side a bit with interesting (but relevant) projects, etc.

The fancier the headings, the weirder the fonts, and the more offset the tables, the more likely you are to be on the bottom of the pile. You gain points for PDF, RTF, or plain text, and you lose points for MS Works.

It’s the format I’ve always used, and I’ve never been turned down for an interview in my professional life.

4

Thanks for the tips, Rabbit.

That’s pretty much what my resume looks like already, though my post-secondary is pretty bare since certs aren’t required and I don’t have any - I’ll keep my BA there, despite the fact that it’s wildly unrelated to the job, because it’s better than no BA at all. :slight_smile:

So assuming no one else pipes up, that’s precisely how I’m going to keep it (adding on the more recent experience, of course).

Anne, I wasn’t planning on omitting entries in my job history since, puzzling gaps aside, they’re all related to this position one way or another. My dilemma has more to do with being on temporary assignment for a year - I’m not too sure how to present the whole Permanent Job vs. Contract Job thing in a short, succinct kind of way that isn’t going to confuse people. Hell, half of the time I end up confusing myself just trying to make sense of it.

What I’m trying to figure out is whether it make sense to lump the project into my regular work experience and show it as concurrent with my actual job title, or create a separate “Projects” section to hold that and another project I did a couple of years ago. As for the Permanent Job, do I put an end date on that, or do I leave it as “present” to indicate that I still report to that department? These are the things I’m trying to figure out.

5

No prob, and…

If the whole period of employment has been a contract position, I’d do the following:

2004-present: Subject Matter Expert, XYZ Corp (Contract position)
[ul]
[li] Worked on this wicked sick stuff, doing blah blah, blah, blah blah, and blah[/li][li] Worked on some awesome stuff, exceeding yackety yack, yack, and delivering yackety[/li][li] Increased foo by over bar% while decreasing customer malaise by nearly blah%[/li][/ul]

Just the fact that it was a four year contract is impressive enough, at least in my industry, and mentioning that it was contract up front neatly sidesteps questions about why you’re looking for a new job, since contracts eventually come to an end.

If your previous title was substantially more impressive-looking than “Subject Matter Expert” and it wasn’t on contract (I can’t really tell from your posts), you may want to split off the previous job as a separate employment period. However, that risks looking a little tacky. It’s probably best to just put the final title on the resume but bring up the special circumstances in the interview, so there won’t be any surprises in the employment verification stage. But that’s just MHO.

6

Actually, all three jobs are within the same company.

Permanent Job is essentially a glorified customer service posting.
Temporary Job is one I was assigned to by the higher-ups at Permanent Job, because they needed representation to make sure this new system wouldn’t screw them over (and it very nearly did, might I add).
New Job is an evolution of Temporary Job, doing the same thing but with more responsibility, better pay, plus the benefit of no longer having Permanent Job sitting on the sidelines threatening to drag me back in.

So, people hiring for New Job will understand what’s going on, to some degree. My concern is the folks at HR who sort the resumes, since they may not be quite as quick to untangle this mess and may just toss my resume into the reject pile rather than try.

I guess I’ll put both, but separate out Temporary Job under a header of “Project Assignments” to make that clear.

Ugh. I’m already frazzled and this is just over the resume… hopefully the cover letter will go better. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m curious about this part. I got a book to help me with my resume (this one ) and it confirmed what I had heard elsewhere – that for e-mail or online resume submission, you paste your resume into the body of the e-mail (and then make format corrections) because attachments from unknown senders are presumed to be viruses and you risk deletion. But if I were to include an attachment, are .pdf, .rtf, and .txt really more desirable than .doc? I can see .rtf, but a lot of people are annoyed with .pdfs, and .txt seems a little TOO lacking in format options…

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When I was looking in Ottawa, and then back in the States, every headhunter I sent it to wanted something different. I absorbed the good ideas and wound up with something very similar to what black rabbit suggested.

The last one I sent it to wanted me to completely revise it - just tear it apart and start from scratch. I dug my heels in and said, “No, send it that way. It’s a good resume now.”

That’s the job I got.

9

Pardon the hijack. Frank, do you mind my asking what field are you in? And, did you aim specifically to move to St. Louis, or is that just where the job happened to be? I’m asking because I’m planning to move to StL in 2009, and I’m starting to think about contacting recruiters. My experience with them up to this point has been pretty lousy, though.

10

People have their own preferences, but I would say .doc is the default. (He was taking off points for Works, not Word). I think about 1/2 the world would prefer .pdf and the other half prefer .doc. .rtf and .txt may be good if you are one techie sending a resume to another techie. If it is going through HR folks or admin, probably better to go with .doc or .pdf. Be careful typing into the body of the email, since as emails get passed around formatting isn’t always consistent, unless you’re an absolute wiz with minimalist formatting.

To the OP, stay with chronological, don’t get fancy, sounds like you’re on the right track.

11

When I was in my old job as a manager in a technology consulting firm, I did a lot of hiring and looked at a lot of resumes. A couple of things that seemed to stick out with a resume.

  1. It is forwarded along to a hiring manager by someone in the company. The more senior that person forwarding, the more notice it gets.

  2. Specific colleges, companies, certifications, or technologies. ie if you are an MIT grad who used to implement SAP software for Accenture, that might stand out to one of their competetors.

  3. Solid progression and focus in a particular industry. Relevant degree. Appropriate certifications. Real experience. Promotions every few years. No 5 jobs in 4 years.

Avoid the typical IT worker mistake of writing 6 pages of every technology on every project you ever worked on. No one wants to read all that shit. Then again, sometimes, people just look at it and say “well…he looks like he has a lot of experience” so who knows.

Here’s what I do. Under the header with my BIG NAME and contact info,

POSITION DESIRED (IT manager, Director of Operations, whatever, big and bold)
Some * of your * relevant * areas * of expertise (one line of one or two words each, much smaller font, separated by bullets)

Summary of Experience

  • About 4-5
  • Bullet summarizing
  • Your relevant experience over
  • The years (3 years database mangement, 5 years program manager, etc)

Work History
Chronological entries for each company you worked at. Incorporate company name, title, location and dates worked. If you were there for short periods of time or if there are gaps, use just the years.

For each company, write a few short sentances summarizing the type of work you did.

  • Add about three bullets
  • of specific qualtifyable achievements
  • and how they benefited the company

ie:

Synergy Consulting, Sometown, CA 2003-2008
Subject Matter Expert (2004-2008)
Designed and implemented marketing tools for a $x million consulting firm.

  • Increased inter department synergy by 30%
  • Improved customer-orientation by 25%

Designer (2003-2004)
Designed a custom marketing tool for a $x million consulting firm.
Education
Your schools and any certifications, awards, GPA if its over a 3.5.

Any Specific Technical Experience
Just include technology you are reasonably strong at using. Nothing turns me off more than someone saying “I theoretically know that” when it’s on their resume and they dont.

Keep in to 1 or two pages max. Your resume should be easy to read and free of mispellings and punctuation errors.

Also, remember your resume is not a story of what you did. It’s a story of why you are a perfect candidate for the position you are interested in.

12

I’m a programmer - currently in Oracle Forms & Reports and PL/SQL.

It’s where the job was; I would have preferred somewhere else. (Though St Louis is all right so far, except that the traffic is horrible and grocery stores are not great.) I had pretty terrible experiences with headhunters too, up until this last one, but there were very few direct hire opportunities in what I know.

13

Yeah. .doc is neutral. MS Works (whatever the extension is) is a big no-no.

Double points for sending TeX markup. But that’s just me.