A Logical Approach to Resume Writing

If you do enough research and lend attention to enough advise (solicited or unsolicited) about resume writing you may find your head spinning enough to twist right off your shoulders. Due to no apparent lack of articles about resume writing tips, my intention is to get people thinking logically about writing their resumes through a few brief tips. Breathe deeply and read on…

What is the correct length of a resume?

This one is easy. The correct length of a resume is the length it needs to be to accurately depict the relevant skills and experience for a given position. Font should be of reasonable size, (10 or 12 point), as well as spacing and margins. I constantly see professionals with 20+ years of experience submitting their 1-page resume hence robbing themselves of the opportunity to accurately promote the career they have spent 20% of their life developing. As an employer and a recruiter, I’ve been involved in the hiring of hundreds of professionals. To date I’ve never heard a hiring manager say, “Well, she was a great candidate but I can’t hire her because her resume is two pages long”. If your resume needs to be two or three pages, so be it.

Understand your audience.

It can be frustrating applying for jobs without timely responses. What we need to understand is many highly qualified hiring managers and human resource professionals are overloaded and understaffed. As tough as it may seem, we need to understand our audiences’ challenges and make their jobs easier. When applying to jobs you need to customize your resume and make it EASY for prospective employers to identify skills and experience on your resume. Applicable skills for a given job must be represented in the first half of your first page. Looking back at the above point on resume length, many people write a one page resume because they believe employers don’t want to read more than a page. This isn’t true. Employers want to read more but don’t want to dig for the right key/buzz words. If the first page of your resume is loaded with the right information, pages two, three, four, etc will certainly be read in detail.

Don’t be afraid to sell a little.

More often than not, the inaccuracy of resumes tends to be a product of under-selling rather than embellishment. In my line of work we call everyone regardless of resume accuracy and I can tell you that it’s truly amazing how much skill and expertise many professionals have but were timid about including on their resume. The analogy I tend to use is that you don’t have to have your black belt to include karate on your resume. Your green or brown belt shows demonstrated expertise so don’t be afraid to sell it. (To ensure this post represents an accurate literal transcript, this theory is applicable for other non-martial-arts skills such as software engineering, data entry, construction, medical, and management.)

Perfection isn’t going to happen.

There is no science to writing a perfect resume. Much like the interpretation of obscure art, the quality is determined arbitrarily by the audience. All you can do is include relevant information, remove irrelevant fluff, and do all you can to spoon-feed the right information to a prospective employer. There is a lot of great advice out there and much of it is well worth of following. Over-thinking the process without a logical approach can be crippling and very discouraging so keep it simple, sell your skills, customize a copy for each role you apply for. I think you’ll find improved results.