I find resume building to be super fun, but I know many people find them tedious, confusing, or just annoying.
What do I put on my resume?
How long should it be?
How should I format it?
Over the past five years, I have created many versions of my resume and have used it to apply to literally hundreds of internships and jobs. I have edited lots of friends’ resumes and done lots and lots of research about resume building.
From my experience, I have learned the 6 steps to building the best resume!
Step 1: List Experiences
If you’ve never built a resume before, or if it’s been a while since your last resume, it’s helpful to make a list of your experiences. Make a list of all your accomplishments, organization memberships, educational institutions and achievements, job experiences, volunteer experiences, skills, and any other relevant information you want to include on your resume. Make sure to include the dates for work experiences and education.
You can update this list anytime something changes and refer back to the list to remember specifics about your experiences. This list is super helpful to have handy when it comes to resume building, so you can just pull information from it!
Step 2: Format Document
There are a few things you should do when formatting your resume.
First, though, open a Google Doc or Microsoft Word document. Start with your name, email, address, and phone number at the top. The first line should be your name in bold centered on the page. The font size of your name should be 16-18. On the line under your name, put your email address, home address, and phone number. You can separate these three items with one of these symbols, “~” or “●.” The font size of your email, address, and phone number should be the same as the rest of your resume (so 10-14).
You want to make sure that your resume has consistent formatting throughout. But what do I mean by that?
Keep it to One Page
Resumes are meant to be quick snapshots of your accomplishments and abilities. No one is going to read your resume if it is more than one page. Job recruiters want to see your past experience with as little effort on their part as possible.
This means that you need to be specific and make your resume fit on one page. This may mean cutting out specific experiences or sections. Or, only needing to fill one page may be great for a college student who doesn’t have much experience.
Structure
Every section of your resume should be formatted the same. Headings should all be the same boldness and size, all your dates should be written out the same way, the font should be the same throughout. The punctuation should be consistent throughout, and your margins should be consistent. Meaning that the right and left margins should be the same, and the top and bottom margins should be the same.
Step 3: Choose Sections
The next step is to decide what sections you want to include on your resume. Once you decide what sections you want to have, make the headings for each of the sections. The headings should stand out from what you will put under them, so they should be bold or capitalized and maybe even centered on the page. Choose 3-5 sections to include on your resume.
The sections you include on your resume are entirely up to you, and they may change depending on the job, internship, or program you are applying for!
In general, it’s usually best to include a section on education, work experience, and skills. Each section should have its own heading, and then under each heading, you will write out each role you had. Under each role you will create a list of accomplishments.
Step 4: Fill in Sections
Now that you have your section headings on your resume, it is time to fill in the information! This is where your master list of accomplishments and experiences comes in handy! Refer back to that list to help you fill in the sections.
Stay mindful of the language you are using on your resume (tense of verbs, strong action verbs) as well as the formatting (bullet points for accomplishments/descriptions, dates under each experience).
Using good action words at the beginning of your descriptions is crucial to good resume writing!
Also, be mindful of how many times you use a specific word. You don’t want four bullet points that all start with the word “created” or “designed.” Try to add some variety to your resume to show that you have done many things in your various roles!
Within your work or volunteer experience sections, you want to make sure to focus on the things you accomplished while in those roles, rather than just describing the role itself.
Wherever possible in your resume, you should try to use numbers! Try to quantify as many accomplishments as possible.
For example, instead of saying:
“Created flyers for live events”
Try saying:
“Created 13 flyer designs that were used for 3 live events.”
Job recruiters are usually quickly looking at resumes and may not spend much time on your resume. Including numbers in your descriptions will draw their attention and make them read more about your accomplishments!
Step 5: Proofread
After you have your resume filled in and everything is written, it is time to proofread. This step is super important because you want to make sure that your resume has no mistakes on it!
Before sending your resume to any job or internship position, you should check your spelling! This is so important! Your resume needs to be flawless because if there are silly spelling errors, people may not take you as seriously for the role you are applying for.
You can use the spell check on Google Sheets or Microsoft Word, but also take some time to really look through your resume yourself. The spell-check software on these programs doesn’t always catch every mistake, so you need to make sure you are keeping an eye out for errors as well!
One of the best ways to make sure your resume looks good, flows well, and doesn’t have any errors is to have someone else read it! You can ask a friend, parent, or professor to look over your resume to ensure it is good to go!
These people will usually have feedback, so take what they say into account before sending in your resume!
Step 6: Save and Send
The last step of the resume writing process is to save and send your resume! You should always save your resume as a PDF and save your resume as “FirstNameLastNameResume.pdf.”
When you send people Microsoft Word documents or Google Docs, the formatting can get messed up sometimes. This is why it’s always necessary to save your resume as a PDF!
You finished resume building! Now what?
Congratulations! You finished resume building! Now it’s time to put that amazing new resume into use by using it to apply to jobs/internships/grad school, or whatever else you’re using it for!
Looking for a more in-depth guide to building resumes? Check out “The Easy Resume Guide” which you can download for free below! This guide walks you through everything you need to know to build a quick, easy, and effective resume!
Still curious about why your resume is so important? Check out this blog post to learn why your resume is important for your career development!