Have any questions on how to write a resume? Not sure how to make the perfect resume work experience section or how to build a resume list of skills or achievements? Get at us in the comments below and we’ll answer your questions. Thanks for reading, and good luck with your résumé preparation!

How to Make a Resume (The Right Way!)

Instead of using a text editor, we recommend choosing a resume builder, such as Novorésumé. Our resume builder is fast, easy, and to put the icing on the cake, a Novorésumé looks much better and can fit more information than your average, cookie-cutter resume.

How to Pick the Right Resume Format?

1) Reverse chronological resume format – This is the most popular resume format and is ideal for people with plenty of work experience that is relevant to the position they’re interested in.

3) Combination resume format – The combination resume is a great choice for job-seekers with a very diverse skill-set. It’s useful if you’re applying for a role that requires expertise in 3-4 different fields, and you want to show all that in your resume. Say, for example, you’re applying for a senior management role, and the requirements are expertise in Management, Sales, and Software Development.

In 90%+ cases, you’d want to stick to the reverse-chronological resume format. This is the most common one, and most HR managers are used to this. Hence, in this guide, we’re going to focus on this specific format.

What is the Best Resume Layout?

1. One page in length. You should only go for 2 pages if you really, really believe that it’ll add significant value. HR managers in big firms get around 1,000+ resumes per month. They’re not going to spend their valuable time reading your life story!

Resume Content – What to Mention on Your Resume

Contact Information

Resume Summary or Objective

The same applies to your job search – the HR manager spends around 6 seconds scanning each resume. Yep, your carefully-worded, hand-crafted resume only gets 6 seconds of attention. Unless, of course, you manage to leave an amazing first impression.

What’s a Resume Summary & When to Use it

A resume summary is a 2-3 sentence summary of your career. You should use a resume summary in basically any situation, unless you’re a recent university graduate or switching careers (in that case, you use a resume objective. More on that later!).

What’s a Resume Objective & When to Use it

Work Experience

How to List Work Experience in a Resume

• Job Title/Position – Your job title goes on top of each work experience entry. When the HR manager scans your resume, you want them to know, at a glance, that you have relevant work experience for the job.
• Company Name / Location / Description – Then, you mention the name of the relevant employer, as well as the location of the office you work/have worked in. In some cases, you may also want to briefly describe the company, if the organization is not a famous household name.
• Achievements and Responsibilities – This is the core of each work experience entry. Depending on your field, you want to list either your achievements or responsibilities. We’ll get more into the how’s and why’s of this in a bit.
• Dates Employed – The timeframe of your employment in each company. Not sure about the exact dates you worked somewhere? Don’t worry – you don’t have to be accurate by the day, as long as it’s close. The standard format expected by recruiters and employers is mm/yyyy (this is especially important when your job application will be parsed by an Applicant Tracking System).

List Achievements When Possible

Tailor Your Resume to the Job

So, let’s cover a simple example on how to do this. Let’s say that after reading the following job ad for the position of a digital marketer, you discover that the most critical requirements for the job are:

How much work experience do you include in your resume?

If you’ve got over a decade’s worth of work experience, you’re probably confused about how much of it you mention in your resume. After all, If you had to list everything you’ve ever done, you’d end up writing a mini-novella.

How to List Education on Your Resume

Emphasize Your Know-How with the Skills Section

Soft Skills (Personal skills). These are a mix of social skills, communication skills, personal traits, career attributes, and so on. Leadership, critical thinking, management, and communication, just to name a few.

How to List Skills in Your Resume

Expert – You’ve applied this skill in more than a handful of different projects & organizations. You’re the go-to person for advice about the skill, not just in your office, but even amongst some of the best professionals in your field.

Imagine your first task at work as an Illustrator – to create a graphic vector to go nicely with an article. If you end up delivering a hastily drawn stick figure colored with a paint bucket tool in Microsoft Paint, you’ll be out of the job before your probation period ends.

Step #2 – Tailor Your Skills to the Job. You might have some super rare, awesome skills, but they’re not always going to be useful. For example, it’s awesome that you know accounting, but would you really need it at your new job as a line cook? Exactly!

Start with a Heading Statement (Resume Summary or Resume Objective)

That’s why a professional resume heading statement is super-important to get right. You’ve got to compose a statement, with wit, that paints an attractive image of your candidacy. After all, what is the purpose of a resume but to give the best impression of your clout as a candidate.

Resume Summary Statement

See the differences here? While the Wrong one has some experience listed, it focuses on everyday duties, not accomplishments. In the Right example, you give evidence of your IT consultant resume skills, achievements, and experience.

Resume Tip: The “right” resume summary above also mentioned the company by name. This is a great way to make sure that your resume feels personalized, rather than just sent to every company out there.

Resume Objective Statement

Choose the resume objective statement if you have no work experience at all, or at least none related to the position you’re applying for (entry-level applicants, career changers, students, etc.).

Since you don’t have relevant experience to summarize, you’ll highlight transferable skills from other areas. You’ll make the case that though you don’t have experience with this position, you do have experience relevant to it.

List Your Relevant Work Experience & Key Achievements

How to format the resume work experience section

• Job Title—This should go at the very top of each entry of work history so that it’s easy for potential employers to scan and find. Make it bold and/or increase the font size by 1pt or 2pts from the rest of the entry.
• Company, City, State—On the second line, include the previous employer’s company name, and the city and state of the location you worked at.
• Dates Employed—Thirdly, put the timeframe of your employment there. You can add the year or both the month and the year, but there’s no need to put exact days.
• Key Responsibilities—Don’t just list every single task you did in your job history. Focus on the few duties most relevant to the new job.
• Key Achievements—Often overlooked, but super important. Employers know what you did, but they need to know how well you did them.
• Keywords—It is important to sprinkle resume keywords throughout the experience section (we’ll talk more about this shortly).

Also, your experience section resume bullet points should go near the top, just under your heading statement. However, if you have little or no professional experience, put your education section above your work history.

Think about accomplishments you’ve had, not necessarily meaning solid sales numbers or percentages. Were you involved in something that had great success? If so, include it! Showing what you’ve done beyond your daily duties is what will prompt employers to call you. Employers want to hire someone who exhibits motivation, participation, and ambition.

Tailoring your resume work experience

As hiring practices continue to modernize, larger companies are turning to applicant tracking systems (ATS) to give them a hand. ATS software automates the early stages of the recruitment process. How? They look for keywords and assign a score per candidate.

How much work experience to include on a resume?

First-time job hunters with no work experience can still include other history, such as a student organization role, internship, or volunteer experience, to fill out their experience section.

As you learn how to write a resume, remember the best resume templates will highlight your experience and eligibility. Don’t hide it with the wrong order, a dull resume layout, or a template free of character. With dozens of good resume examples, templates, and styles, Zety is the best resume builder online.

3. Add a resume header

Hiring managers, especially those at large companies, have many applications to review for each job opening. With so much competition, it can be tough to make sure your resume gets the attention it deserves.

Your resume introduction provides a quick snapshot of your experience, skills, and qualifications at the very top of your resume. It should be 3–5 sentences, and can be written in either sentence or bullet-point format.

1. Resume summary

2. Resume objective

Here’s the formula for putting together an effective resume objective:

5. Target your work experience to the job ad

To make your work experience section shine, target each bullet point to the specific job you want. Look carefully at the skills mentioned in the description, and showcase any of those skills you have with clear examples.

This marketing job ad features many hard and soft skills you can add to your resume.

Taylord’s Marketing Firm, Reno, NV
July 2017 – August 2018

• Collaborated with the outreach department to develop innovative marketing solutions for 6 unique products

• Developed branding materials for a new mobile app, resulting in a 14% increase in sales

• Analyzed weekly performance statistics, ensuring that effectiveness of outbound marketing activities

Not only does tailoring your experience section to the job ad make your resume more attractive to employers, but it also helps you get through the applicant tracking system (ATS) software that many large companies use.

ATS software automatically scans your resume for specific skill-related keywords to determine if you’re qualified for the role. If the software doesn’t find the keywords it’s looking for, it automatically rejects your application before a hiring manager even gets to see it.

Sources:

https://novoresume.com/career-blog/how-to-write-a-resume-guide
https://zety.com/blog/how-to-make-a-resume
https://resumegenius.com/blog/resume-help/how-to-write-a-resume