Your resume should present your skills and experience clearly and accurately. Our staff and potential employers are looking to match your experience with specific requirements. Avoid generalities but keep each position description to 150 to 300 words. For multi-year positions keep the description to below 500 words.
Some key Do’s and Don’ts:
DO
- Describe the work experience and specific skills, languages, platforms, frameworks or techniques used.
- Use descriptions and detail appropriate to position e.g. if you are a developer, use technical descriptions; if a business analyst, use business descriptions.
- Ensure that company and industry for which you did the work are identifiable.
- Identify specific results obtained or other measurements of productivity.
- Identify and describe your role and contribution to team or group projects.
- Make descriptions shorter and less detailed as positions get older.
- Use company and position only for jobs over 10 years old.
- Identify out-of-country work locations.
- Have different resumes emphasizing different roles — analyst vs QA; designer vs PM.
- Proofread your resume
DON’T
- Skip over work experiences or leave out positions
- Claim skills you don’t have — even if it gets you an interview it won’t get you the job.
- Include irrelevant details that are unlikely to be applicable to another position.
- Claim skills, experience or interests that you can not elaborate on during the interview.
- Claim credit for results for which you were only a minor contributor.
- Include untrue statements. These will get your resume rejected, you banned and possibly fired.
- Don’t randomly Capitalize Words just because they Seem Important.
- Don’t use an overly elaborate format but make sure that your resume looks professional.