Omega-mé

Meanwhile, back at the CR Cave, the Caped Recruiter and her handy Thesaurus were getting ready to finish up the discussion on resumes with some handy tips to cover all situations.

Data Tips

• Make extra effort to scan through your resume in search of out-dated, old-fashioned and no-longer used terms. Phrases like ‘data processing’ or titles like ‘programmer analyst’ can give the reader the (false?) impression that you have not kept up with the times.
• Spell check! Spell check! SPELLCHECK!!!
• Resumes read best in bullet format – hiring managers are busy people (let’s beat that dead horse yet once again!) who have to read quickly and efficiently.

Display Tips

• Don’t use Styles and Formatting – every company reformats resumes before sending them to the hiring managers – it is time-consuming to work with “Heading”, etc. Just make it all “Normal” or “Clear Formatting” and then use tabs and bullets for your formatting. Tables are also a pain to reformat. Making the recruiter’s job more difficult and time-consuming is not the way to ensure he wants to work for you!
• A resume should have consistency throughout the document – of fonts, of font size, of indentation, of bullet style. You don’t have to use Times New Roman 11 throughout – just make sure that the section dividers all use the same font, the same size, the same strength, ditto the employer names, the employment dates, etc. Be consistent.
• Use Upper- and Lower-case letters throughout. All caps feels like you’re SCREAMING at the reader – and a very large, very bold type also feels like a scream. Bolding is great when used for emphasis or to highlight certain experiences, but an over abundance of bold type or a heavy font also feels very loud.
• Choose a font that travels well. While that speciality font you bought looks great on your screen or on a hard copy you print, when the resume is opened by a Recruiter who doesn’t have that font on his server it will probably default to Times New Roman and could lead to some unfortunate formatting issues (and reflect badly on your technical skills).
• Please send it in Word format – many resume storage databases do not read PDF.

So, that’s it, the end, finis. This is Resumes Omega. I’ve given you everything I know about resumes. I hope these postings can help you improve your resume and land your next great assignment!