English 420, Business Writing

The resumes I have chosen to review are resume 3 and resume 4.

Both resumes have very good designs. They make excellent use of space in filling out the entire page with content. There is a very good use of white space in separating the dates of employment and activities. Resume 4 makes better use because the bullet points immediately beneath the dates get a little wordy in resume 3 and begin to mask the dates a bit. But I almost feel there is too much I also like the contrast in text on resume 4 a little more than on resume 3. Resume 4 uses underlined text to separate the different sections of his page and I feel it works a little better. The font on resume 3 is noticeably larger. I feel this is unnecessary and while it fills up more room on his page, I am not a fan of this appearance. I have always felt that changing the size of your text above 12 point is bad unless it’s a heading. Other than that, font increases make it feel like you are trying to hide that you don’t have enough information to fill out the page.
The content of the two resumes is also very similar. I like that both have their own sections for internships and don’t mix it in with other job experiences. I have noticed that internships tend to teach more about the different aspects of the business than just doing your job which gives you more of an understanding of the business. I definitely like the amount of description in each of the resumes. Both use action verbs without complete sentences but still explain what they have done in their previous experiences. Both resumes could use a little more explanation I think into the personality of the applicant. However this could be better suited to get across in an interview setting later. If I was reading a resume though, I would like to see more of how they spend their free time. Resume three seems to not have any good direction however. Most obvious is the summary section. There is no personal objective and seems like he is just using the resume for a lot of jobs. I would not want to interview someone who has no aim in where they want to go in life because they tend to either just work their time and treat it like a job and not a career meaning they only work hard enough not to get fired or they get sick of the work easily and tend to flake out and quit. This does not better the company in any way that I can see. Given the choice between these two resumes I would call in resume 4 because the only way I really see that resume 3 is better is that they saved room for content in their personal contact information by putting it all on one like with bullet separation.