Kirrian K: Creating A Professional Resume

When preparing to write a resume, there are a few themes that run through most of the websites and sources I have come across. First, a resume is not only a history of your life’s work, but more so an advertisement of you. You are selling yourself to your prospective employer as someone he/she must have in his or her company. Since employers see literally hundreds of resumes come across their desk, you have but a small window of opportunity to stand out over all of the other resumes. It was stated on Resume Genius that 8 out of 10 resumes are discarded with only a 10 second glance and you have about 25 seconds to make a really good impression with your resume.

The second most important part of writing your resume is to make sure you have the right format. Most websites state that you should keep the format simple and easy to follow and not have the resume too broken up with too many lines and breaks. As stated on the Zip Recruiter website, the best length of a resume is between 600 and 700 words. They call this the goldilocks length, not too long, not too short. In fact, resumes should rarely if ever be longer than 2 pages.

Thirdly, making sure you have some standard sections in your resume is very important. As stated on the Ziprecruiter website, having these sections were very important to prospective employers:

Objective
References
Work History
Training
Career Summary

Finally it is very important to have a great summary statement that is not too long, yet catches the prospective employer's attention. It needs to be written in a professional manner and basically include who you are and what your skills are. You need to be honest with your resume and do not exaggerate your skills or qualifications while at the same time you don’t want to sell yourself short and be too modest.

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