Introduction & Tips

1) Building the perfect resume: Your resume is your personal marketing tool. It is an advertisement of your skills and experiences, and wins you the opportunity to interview with a prospective employer. Without an effective resume, you often will not get the opportunity to interview. The right resume will get your foot in the door. Resume writing is one of the most important facets of your job search. Fortunately, technology resumes have a very simple format. The key to writing an effective resume is to put yourself into the head of the prospective hiring manager or human resources recruiter.

Survey results show that the average time spent reading an individual resume is 10 to 30 seconds. Understand that this task either falls on a professional recruiter who scans hundreds of resumes in a week, or on an already overworked hiring manager who is covering for a staff shortage and trying to interview for qualified candidates at the same time.

Keeping this information in mind, try to:

• Stress positives: Leave out negatives where you can.

• Be concise: Balance between detail and succinct presentation.

• Avoid abbreviations: Spell everything out completely.

• Keep a consistent and professional format: Pick a spacing and format style and stick with it. Err on the conservative side.

• Edit carefully: Screen for grammatical errors, poor punctuation and other avoidable mistakes.

• Brevity: Try and keep the resume under two pages long.

2) Common Mistakes

What you should leave out?

Here are some things that you should not include in your resume:

Leave out salary requirements. Go in to win the job. Once you are the employer's primary candidate, you have more bargaining power than you did when you were just a piece of paper sitting in a stack of dozens of similar resumes.

Leave out personal information, such as activities, hobbies, interests and non-job related skills that have no relevancy to your work history. This information can often be a factor in rejection, and is very rarely a deciding factor in scheduling you for an interview. If you have career-related information that you feel must be present in your resume, place it between your employment history and your references, at the end of your resume. This information usually includes professional affiliations or industry publications.