Facts About Resumes
Should I keep my Resume short and crisp or should I exaggerate? If I keep it brief, how will the employer come to know about all that I have done? If I exaggerate, may be the employer will not go through it as it is too detailed? Are these thoughts troubling you when you start penning down the most important document for a job search? Read along to understand some important and useful facts about resumes.
- Your resume should always stress upon your marketability and consistency and highlight your work experience and skills acquired.
- Mainstream of the employers prefer a chronological resume and do not prefer to look at it for more than 10-20 seconds.
- Majority of the employers prefer looking at a resume with a cover note and a thank you note.
- Too frequent job changers are generally a No for most employers. Therefore, if your resume talks about too many changes in the recent past, it is advisable to state a short line advising why the change was done. Reasons like promotion offered, increased pay, business winding down are all perfectly acceptable reasons.
- A grammatically incorrect resume with spelling errors, typos will always leave a negative impression on the employer.
- Maximum bit, about 80% of the first screening happens through the resume.
- Employers appreciate a tweaked and tailor made resume that suits the employers need instead of a “one for all” resume.
- The purpose of the resume is not to get a job but to land you up with an interview.
- Mentioning generic objectives is again one of the biggest mistakes a job seeker can do, it indicates that person is not sure about his/er career goals.
- The flow and order of information on the resume occupies critical importance. When the employer starts scanning the resume, which does not take more than 10-20 seconds, they loose interest if the candidate has started is resume with information that has no relevance to the job being applied for.
- A 4-5 page resume makes the employer loose interest immediately. Therefore, focus on your achievements than the responsibilities. Also remove unrelated experiences and skills.
- A lot of people feel that deleting work experiences is like hiding information. However, that is not true. As you progress in your career, earlier work experiences decrease in value. It is advisable to keep your experiences and skills limited to the last 8-10 years of your professional life and remove experiences that have no linkage to the job applied for. You can condense the experiences prior to that in may be a paragraph.
- Use consistent fonts; make the format look simple and neat. A good font to use is Times New Roman for print resumes. Bold your headers. Avoid colors.
- Most employers prefer an employee keeping the job for at least two years before changing it.
All these tips make certain that your resume looks polished and increases the chance of it being read.
