Sunday, February 11, 2007

Resume Help

I found this article and I thought it would be helpful for the class since we will be preparing a resume in the following weeks. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16931758/. It is very challenging trying to put together a resume in a short period of time. This article gives 10 ideas to help people either update their resume or begin a new one. I recently had to write my resume and I was worried that I wouldn't know what to do or how to do it. I wish I had read this article because it does include some good tips. Tip #2 says to "avoid vague objective statements." This is very important because the people that are looking to hire people read a lot of resumes and they probably do not want to be bored reading unclear phrases. Be concise and to the point. The objective statement is very important. It is one of the first things the reader sees because it is near the top of the page and because the phrase states the job that you are looking for. I suggest spending some time thinking about the objective before doing anything else.
I had a lot of help from a friend of mine and without him, I definitely would not have completely my resume. He directed me to the website at SJSU. http://www.careercenter.sjsu.edu/jobsearchtips/jobsearchtips.html. There are sample resumes and a lot of helpful tips. The most helpful thing I found on this website is the list of keywords. These are basically words that sound sophisticated, but really are not. For example, use the word facilitate instead of help (The thesaurus is also a great tool). Facilitate just sounds better than help does. The sample resumes on the website give people an idea on how to format their resume. A basic format would be to include your name and address on the top, followed by the objective, education, previous jobs, then activities and interests. One more very important tip is to check the spelling and grammar. Even though it may seem like a small thing, it does give the idea that attention to detail is not important to you. Have a few different people read the resume carefully in order to catch any mistakes.

1 comment:

Brent Duka said...

You seem to know so much about resumes. Do you work as a resumer creator for people?