Career Development

Hurriedly-Prepared Résumés are Often Inadequate

Recently, I participated in a career fair at a large university. I staffed my company’s booth and collected résumés for interviews my colleagues would conduct later this month.

In collecting résumés, I observed that a fair number of students’ résumés had lots of errors: spelling mistakes, clutter, poor organization, and so on—overall, incoherent portrayals of their credentials and achievements.

Disappointedly, I asked a few students when they had prepared their résumés for the career fair. Not surprisingly, most students responded with a “over the weekend” or “earlier this morning” answer. “Last night, I looked at the résumé I had prepared for last year’s career fair and updated it,” one student revealed.

Overcome Procrastination: Keep Your Résumé Ready

For many of us, preparing a comprehensive résumé is an overwhelming—if not the most difficult—element of the job-search process. We feel intimidated by the challenge of discussing our credentials and achievements, presenting them in a manner that will impress hiring managers—and do all this in just one page.

The result is that we often procrastinate on preparing or updating our résumés. When we need to prepare a résumé ahead of a career fair or when we discover a lead, we tend to put something together in haste and expect it to work efficiently. We do not realize that our résumés may compete with hundreds of other résumés for every job offer out there.

Update your Résumé Frequently

• If you are in college, revise your résumé at the beginning of each semester. Add relevant details from the past semester: particulars of your part-time work or course projects and update details such as your GPA or aggregate scores.
• If you work, update your résumé after each quarterly-performance review with your supervisor. Add relevant details from your projects and assignments from the recent past. Every year, after your annual-performance review, update your résumé thoroughly.
• Review each section of your résumé critically and question yourself, “Is this section relevant? Is there anything more worthwhile that I could replace this section with?”
• Review the details in each section and ask yourself, “What else could I add to this section? How could I better present this detail?”
• Get your résumé critiqued. If you are at college, consult a career counselor at your college’s career centre. If you are employed, show your résumé to colleagues, mentors, or others who may represent the intended audience for your résumé. Request them to critique every detail and make sure they understand details of your achievements.

Concluding Thoughts

By updating your résumé frequently, you can reduce the anxiety of preparing an impressive résumé at short notice. With reduced stress, you can focus on preparing for the other aspects of your job-search process—researching specific companies represented at the career fair or preparing to sell yourself to interesting companies.

A number of résumés list two or three professional references. Others may contain a variation of the phrase “References available upon request.”

Neither is necessary. Here are four reasons.

1. References are pertinent only during the later part of the job-search process: after a potential employer has interviewed you and desires to check others’ impressions of you prior to extending you a job-offer.
2. As a candidate, you would want to be the first person to describe yourself to the potential employer. You would not like the employer to contact your references beforehand and form an opinion of you ahead of your interview.
3. If you post your résumé online (on your college’s career website or at a job-search site such as monster.com,) you would not want to make public your references’ contact information.
4. Employers understand that you will give them a list of references when asked for.

Best Practice on Résumé References

Listing references is not the best use of space on a one-page résumé. Eliminate the list of references or the “available upon request” phrase from your résumé.

Instead, on a separate sheet of paper, prepare a list of two or three professional references. For each reference, include name, contact information and a phrase about the nature of your relationship with the reference. Bring this sheet to your interview and present it when the potential employer asks for references.

Use the valuable space to enhance your résumé either by adding further details of your accomplishments or by increasing white space around various sections of your résumé to make it more visually appealing.

Your résumé is your personal advertisement. The purpose of a résumé, therefore, is to sell you, not to describe you. In order to grab a recruiter’s interest and create a positive impression within a few seconds, your résumé should be comprehensive and tidy.

One-page résumés are appropriate for college candidates (entry-level candidates, to be more specific,) and candidates with less than ten years of work experience. Such candidates rarely have substantial accomplishments to justify a résumé of more than a page in length.

More-experienced candidates may use two pages to describe their accomplishments. Even here, one-page résumés are recommended. Recruiters will survey the second page only if the contents of the first page are appealing.

A one-page résumé acknowledges the importance of a recruiter’s time. A two-page résumé is a sign of disregard.

Compact your Résumé

Follow these guidelines to consolidate your résumé content into one page.

• Comprehension is crucial. Recruiters hate wordy résumés. They first glance through the organization of a résumé and quickly skim over particulars in key sections. A strong, comprehensive presentation is consequently appealing.
• Avoid a tell-it-all résumé. Avoid the common mistake of providing too many details. Leave some details for discussion in a potential interview.
• Restrict accomplishments under each position held to two or three bullet points only. Weed out unimportant details. Use phrases if necessary.
• Do not cram. Do not reduce page margins and font-sizes or eliminate white space. Résumés crowded with information are hard to read.

Conclusion

A one-page résumé is usually long enough to present all the essential information concisely and captivatingly. It can easily engage a recruiter and convince him/her that your background merits further consideration.