Resume Writing - Do's & Dont's

The very important thing while preparing a resume is to invest your own time. Don’t just give an excuse that your resume is not good because you are not finding time to prepare it properly or update it.

Personal Section:

• Don’t mention multiple email ids. It creates confusion during communication.
• Don’t mention office email id. It shows you are spending office time and resources for personal activities.
• No multiple mobile phone numbers. If mentioned please put the timings for each number or mention the reason like local/outstation number.
• Some people omit the residential address, but it is important for the HR in order to generate the offer letter using this address. Also it gives impression that you are trying to hide something.

Objective Section:

Use objective section only if you are serious about your objective. Most of the people just copy the objective from some standard templates or from friend’s CV and don’t have any clue whether it really reflects his/her own objective.

Summary Section:

Understand that this is not an answer paper in an exam where you need to fill tons of pages just by writing the same sentence in different ways. For e.g below is the copy of two points from a CV. I don’t understand what these two lines mean !!!

• Experience in working on the Internet related technologies such as HTML, XML.
• Done extensive coding with XML, HTML, and JavaScript.

Skills Section:

Don’t include all the skills which you have come across in your college days or in your project which you have not worked on. This is useful just to get an interview call but not to fetch a job.

Group the skills in a proper manner. Incorrect grouping will put you in trouble during interview.

Project Details Section:

Project Description:
Be precise and short while putting project description. Don’t write pages of information here.

Start and End Dates:
Not mentioning this will leave an impression that you are trying to hide something.

Roles and Responsibilities:
This is the most important section which every interviewer see and would like to know more information. So, don’t just mention your responsibilities as design, development coding, testing etc.

Instead, mention the modules/features that are designed, developed, tested and the technologies used like


Modified, module A’s design to increase its performance by 50%.
Module A is modified to handle multiple requests simultaneously.
Developed connectivity between module A and B using so and so technology.

Project Achievements:
You can mention your individual or teams achievements and the awards received for this project from top management and customers.


General Achievements

Do mention your achievements irrespective of whether it is small or big right from your school days. Leave the judgment to the employer to decide how big or how important that achievement is for. Also you need to make a judgment on what type of achievements to include based on your experience level and based on the kind of job you are looking at.

Hobbies

Although I see this section mostly in fresher’s CVs, it would be useful to mention in experienced people’s CVs also only if you are serious about this hobby. Most of the experts strictly say not to mention hobbies, it is just my personal thought. I would look at a person with Trekking as his hobby might be a good team player and having a good risk taking and leadership abilities. Similarly a person with advanced level of chess might be good in analysis, impact analysis, strategic thinking.


Quality

Spelling mistakes – Avoid these. It shows you are not serious.

Fonts - Maintain consistency in fonts and their sizes across. Don’t try to use too many fonts. Don’t try to use too small or bigger fonts for normal text.

Skills - Mention skills in proper case. Don’t write HTML as Html, html.

Spacing and layout - Use tabs to insert spaces instead of multiple space bars. Make sure proper page breaks are inserted.

Always save the document with default view as “Print Layout” and with 100% zoom. In other layouts there are chances of missing some information like “Headers and Footers" are not visible in normal layout.

Try to open the resume in multiple systems and see the spacing and layout is preserved.

Proper Ordering:
Employer looks at information which is relevant for the current job. So, order your section properly based on the importance. Always put the project details in the reverse chronological order.

Project Description:
Don't mention any obvious things like "Designed the application as per client request".

It is better to avoid words like "duties include" and "responsibilities include". Employers would like to know what you have done instead of what duties or responsibilities given to you.

Don't be lazy to update your old project descriptions which contain sentences like "Working on improving the performance of module A".

Style:
I see most of the people resumes in a typical format which is quite boring like my blog. :-). You need to showcase your creative skills or your individual thinking style by putting your own format. It should be like your wedding card (Don't try to use the Calligraphy fonts used in the cards). The effort you put to make it different from other cards is required here also. You should give a feeling to the reader that you stand apart from the crowd and increase your chances of easily getting picked.

Fonts:
Use the fonts which are available by default on all systems like Arial, Times, Verdana etc. This will avoid displaying special ??? characters, if a particular font is not found in the Employer's system.

Spelling and Grammar:
In the last article it was mentioned to do a spell check. Also, review it once again or give it to others to proof read it. Look out for similar sounding words like Weak | Week, prospective | perspective.

Format: Text / RTF / Word / PDF?
Most of the HRs, recruiters do prefer Word than any other format. On the presentation front Word and PDF wins over Text and RTF formats. For recruiters, Word is the preferred format. Since they generally remove the contact information from the resume, it is convenient from them to do it in Word. You can use PDF if you are directly sending it HR of a company.