How To Write a Stellar Resume

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• April 16, 2010
• By Team Brazen
• 7 Comments

Resume writing can often be a pain-staking process, but if you can make it to the other side, the reward of listing your achievements and experiences is quite the motivation. Making an impact with a single sheet of paper isn’t as daunting as it sounds, we promise. Here’s what the experts and our peers have to say:

Use results, not descriptions

Scott Keegan: Formulate your achievements in each role so it’s easy to see what a difference you’ve made in each role then you’ll be well on your way to having a really catching CV.

Delta Waters: Resumes these days are not like your father’s resume. They are now a piece of advertising selling YOU. You say what you did but not HOW you met your responsibilities or accomplished tasks. You “evaluate payment and other financial data to solve business problems”…what is the premiere problem you solved? How much time, money, and resources did it save the company? What improvements did you recommend? What was the ultimate outcome?

You must have results-oriented info. i.e. you sold kayaks…what was the result? Increased sales by how much? Managed inventory… what was the net worth of this inventory? Did you impact sales? Planned all meetings and social gatherings…how many? What went into your planning organizing?

List transferable skills for career changes

Raina: Why not put a skills matrix at the top of your resume that has your strongest transferable skills listed in a table, and then tailor each of the accomplishments of each job to look like they can be transferred to the positions for which your applying. I mean, as much as you can, focus on making every bullet point and every accomplishment seem as transferable as possible for the new position you want.

Avoid listing your GPA

Ed Barrientos: I’m not sure I would add a GPA in the resume. I’ve seen it done, but typically, I would discourage it. Unless you have over 4.0 and a whole bunch of distinctions, it doesn’t help you and could hurt you.

Kathryn Smith: In response to all the GPA talk… I just realized WHY it’s a bad idea… when I put a number on my resume, I’m allowing the recruiter/hiring manager/whoever to directly compare me to other candidates with GPAs on their resumes. I might have better experience, be a better fit, but unless I can get them to look that far, the bigger number wins. And unfortunately, they might stop there.

Keep it all in the same tense family

Kavita Amin: I would go through your resume and double check all of your tenses in your bullet points. You want all of them to be the same tense. It’s not an obvious tweak but it can be a pet peeve for some recruiters!

Stick to a page, unless you’ve got the experience

Meredith Sweet: It’s generally thought that most recruiters don’t spend more than 10-15 seconds looking at your resume. Unless you’ve got a lot of outstanding, relevant experience, there doesn’t seem to be much point to getting it to two pages, because recruiters typically won’t even look at the second page

Sean Masters: It’s generally appropriate for those people with experience; you might use a two-page resume if you have had 3 or more jobs with at least two years spent in each position, if you have worked for one company for a long time and want to show progression through the ranks (i.e. 2-3 years as this, then 2-3 as the next up the ladder, etc).

Generally speaking you should only go over one page if you actually have experience. Do not fill up your resume with skills, awards, education (unless the job calls for this one), etc. just to get to two pages.

No need to list you’ve got references

Todd Nilson: Completely unnecessary. You have better things to do with the space.

Nix the objective too

Maruska: My counselor at Pepperdine said putting in an objective is dated too. Because the objective is to get the job instead put in “Value added” because that’s what they want to know –What value do you bring to them.

Delta Waters: It’s not a good idea to put on a resume an objective statement stating your wants and needs. Think about offering a statement addressing the needs of the employer.

Pay attention to design – no clutter!

Julia Watson: [Resumes can be a] bit crowded and busy. Try to make all info easily accessible and easy to see… On opening it you want the reader to feel comfortable and interested to read more. Not too overwhelmed with all the info.

Juliana Brodsky: First, try to pare down what’s included to just essential information… Now that you’ve got space, look at the message that your resume sends. The last thing you can do to make your resume pop is to spend a little bit of time on the visual design. Try indenting the bullet points, futz around with your header, etc. Having the right amount of white space will make a difference.

Find these conversations, get feedback on your resume and more in the network Resume Feedback >

What do you have to add? Do you have a golden resume? Share your tips!

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