Friday, November 19, 2010

10 Tips to an Excellent Resume - By PricewaterhouseCoopers

PWC PricewaterhouseCoopers held a seminar on how to take advantage of LinkedIn to find a Job, and during that seminar they handed out fliers with the following 10 tips on how to build an excellent resume:

1. Limit Your Brilliance to One Page
Your resume is a marketing tool and not a laundry list of everything you've ever done. By keeping your resume short, you're demonstrating that you can edit yourself and sell your skills clearly and concisely.

2. Professionalize Your Contact Info
Resumes with email addreses like  ILovePuppies@internetserviceprovider.com  may not seem profesional to the company you are applying to. Make sure your email addresses are professional and appropriate. The same goes for vioce mail messages.

3. Include Unpaid Experience
Just because you didn't get compensated for certain work doesn't mean it shouldn't count as experience for your resume. By all means include internships, volunteer work, and part-time jobs if you achieved significant results or learned important skills in those positions.

4. Quantify Your Results
Employers dont just want to know what you did; they also want to know what results you accomplished. How many people did you oversee as a store manager? How much money did you save the junior class as treasurer? Quantifying your accomplishments demonstrates not only what you acheived, but also the fact that you track your results.

5. Prioritize Your Points
When you list bullet points under each position or activity on your resume, be sure to place the most important task, accomplishment, or responsibility first. Most readers of your resume will pay close attention to what you've chosen to feature as the first item on each list.

6. Customize Your Resume for Different Opportunities
You need to customize your resume for various opportunities by featuring the experience, keywords, and activities that best suite the requirements of that particular position.

7. Include Only Interesting Interests
When it comes to listing interests or hobbies on your resume, only mention something that is particularly unique, uncommon, or memorable. For example, "Founding president of first-ever Tae Kwon Do Club at my university" or "three-time finisher of Chicago marathon." Generic interests such as "travel and reading" are nice, but they don;t add much.

8. Delete the Reference References
Dont wast precious space on your resume with "References available upon request." Potential employers will request a list of references if they want one.

9. Never Lie, Exaggerate, or Twist the Truth
There are so many reasons not to lie on a resume. First of all, if your lie or truth stretching gets discovered, you'll lose a job opportunity with tha company forever. Second, if you exaggerate your skills, such as being fluent in French when you really just studied it in junior high school, your lie will be extremely obvious the day you start your job and you lack the skills you said you had. You should certainly cast yourself in the most positive light, but never, ever take it too far.

10. Proofread, and then proofread again
Finally, there is absolutely, positively no excuse for a single typo or grammar mistake on a resume. Once you've proofread your resume and feel confident it's perfect, have at least two other people review it for mistakes, misspellings, and formatting glitches. You can never check your resume too many times.


career.linkedin.com

http://www.pwc.tv/


No comments:

Post a Comment