swestrup | Resume Formats?

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As I sit here contemplating updating my Resume, I'm reminded that I chose this particular format (or a close cousin) something like 15 years ago. Recently

_sps_ was telling me of various experiments he had performed in the line of resume structure. So, maybe its time to revisit the layout and structure of my Resume. If so, I would ask all and assembled for any pointers to what they think is a good example of a modern resume, and what it is that HR departments are looking for today.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cpirate.livejournal.com

(Stupid LJ character limit on comments...)

That's about all the suggestions I can make that I think would be relevant to you. I thought a lot of them sounded silly when I first heard them, but the more I read the resumes that people submit to us, the more I wish they would implement these ideas. They really do make it easier to quickly get to the heart of a resume. If you want to see my complete resume to see what kind of road I'm leading you down, let me know and I'll try to dig up a halfway sensible version. Or if you ever want me to look over yours, it'd be a pleasure - it's the kind of thing I really enjoy doing.

From:

thebabynancy.livejournal.com

*laughs at LJ character limit*

Character limit is supposed to exist for the long-winded... not the all-informative. Kinda sad.

From:

swestrup

Yeah, I'd like to see an example of your resume. What you're suggesting isn't too far removed from the Old Format I've been using, although I've avoided bullet points until the last section, where I couldn't figure out any way around using them.

From:

cpirate.livejournal.com

I just remembered to have a good look at your resume. In terms of formatting, it's quite good; I mean, I'm no graphic designer, but I can't see any obvious way to improve it. It's much better than most resumes I've seen, including mine (if I could even find a properly-formatted copy).

My main advice, for what it's worth, is to replace some of the paragraphs with bullet points. It might be a bit depressing, but the unfortunate fact is that the people reading incoming resumes are so flooded with irrelevant or cruddy ones that the first reaction on getting a new one is to glance it over very quickly to see if it's even in the right ballpark. You need to make it easy to hook these people at the first read, and unfortunately, long paragraphs of text aren't the way to do it.

As it stands, it's hard to quickly get to the meat of your resume. It just takes too long to get the relevant information out of your introduction, or out of your job descriptions. For a counter-instance, your Hobbies section is just about perfect - it's very easy to skim and quickly get the gist of.

Similarly, the Skills section is too long. The stuff that I, as some hypothetical employer, might be interested in gets swamped by all the other entries. My strategy for dealing with this was two-fold; first, I separated my skills section into a few different subsections. Then, I tailored the contents of each section on a per-resume basis to the particular job I was gunning for. This worked well when I was just sending out single resumes at a time, but has obvious drawbacks if you're looking to do a more generic approach; even then, you can make a few different generic ones that each focus on different things.

One easy way to cut down the clutter is that if you don't want to work with something, or it's (commercially) extinct, take it out of your skills section. I'm thinking of stuff like Icon, APL, Pascal, VAX 780 assembler, etc. It might be fun to have, but it just gets in the way of the more relevant things. You can always bring it up in the interview if it looks like it'd be useful to do so. Another clutter-reduction tool is the whole "Task, Tool, Result" thing I was talking about: if your work history says that you dealt with some tool or language at an old job, you don't necessarily need to repeat that in the Skills section.

Oh, and my only other advice is that you don't need to give so much prominence to your address and contact information. Your name is important, so that should stay how it is now, but you can move the rest of the contact information to a smaller font in, say, one of the upper corners of the page. Or, for balance, you could have your physical address in one corner and your phone/email in the other. Your contact information doesn't have to catch anyone's eye; once they've read the rest of the resume, if they like you they'll go looking for it. They won't say "whoa, hold the phone, this guy lives in DDO? That's great, I always hire the first west islander I see! Get him in for an interview!" :)

So in my opinion, the best resume you can get would be to take the one you have and ruthlessly edit it down. It's incredibly painful to do, and feels like it's a thorougly unproductive waste of time, but the goal is to make it easier to read quickly and this is the best way to get there. The "remove three words from every sentence" rule comes in handy mainly as a way to force yourself to actually do the editing :) But you have to be serious about it - you really do need to take it down to 3-5 bullet points per section, and one line per bullet point, to make it as effective as possible. Even if you don't end up liking the end result, it'll give you a better idea of how to express what you want in as terse a manner as possible.