Instructor Blog #3: Resumes

Resumes are one of the more perplexing documents you'll ever have to compose. You will spend a lot of time thinking about what needs to go into it, then you will spend a lot of time composing the resume, and THEN you will spend a lot of time revising and fine tuning it. However, your audience (the HR person who will be reading your resume) will spend 10-30 seconds reading it! All that work for 10-30 seconds. How frustrating.

To make matters worse, there is no one right way to compose a resume. You have probably received advice from several different parties who all have opposing viewpoints as to what the resume must include and how it must appear. Students in the past have come to me with concerns such as: "The Purdue Career Center said my objective statement is great - so why do YOU have a problem with it?" This is an example of concrete thinking, and I would like your thinking style in this class to extend beyond concrete thinking. For that reason, I will rarely tell you that your resume must be this way or that way. Rather, I will encourage you to think abstractly - that is, to learn many different strategies and choose which to use based on your own informed judgment. This will ultimately give you the edge over your peers because in order to tailor your resume for each new potential employer, you will need to have a flexible understanding of how to compose a resume. Applicants who think that they have ONE master resume that will always be effective are setting themselves up for disaster. I have at least five resumes on file for different situations. Each one portrays my ethos in a slightly or sometimes dramatically different way. For example, I have a resume that emphasizes my work as a theatre artist, one that emphasizes my academic work, one that plays up my corporate experience, and so on.

I would like to share with you a method that I use to keep all of this organized. You certainly don't have to do it my way, but since it's my Instructor Blog, I'll share it anyway! First, I have a folder in my "My Documents" folder reserved just for resumes. In that folder, I have a file called "Master Resume." It has NO visual design to it, and is a plain and stark list of EVERYTHING I have ever done. I mean everything. Even random stuff I did in high school. Having a 'master resume' makes it very easy to compose tailored resumes because all I have to do is copy and paste the relevant items from it into the new resume. I recommend that you do the same, but, as I said, for this class I am not requiring it.

One of the assignments for Monday, June 16th is to read this article. Richardon's article is fantastic because it will really give you a sense for who your audience is. As it turns out, your audience is pretty vicious and is waiting to disprove you, discount you, and disregard you. They aren't looking for reasons to hire you - they are looking for reasons not to hire you. Richardson gives a pretty thorough list of what those reasons are, but I would like to discuss a few of the key ones here.

One of the most important things that Richardson says is:

Show me a clear-cut sense of direction. I keep seeing resumes that are little more than buckets into which a lot of data has been dumped in the apparent belief that I will fill in the gaps, synthesize diverse information, connect the dots and tell you what kind of product you are. I have no incentive to do this, given the number of knights eager to enter the lists. It isn't my job to make sense out of your life.

This comment has two main applications. The first is that a "bucket of data" is not going to be easy to read in 10-30 seconds and will probably be discarded. Instead, you should use visual strategies to help your resume flow. Uh oh, the liberal arts teacher is talking about hippie-dippy stuff like flow! Run for the hills! Try to ignore the Grateful Dead music!!! No, it's okay. Calm down. Visual strategies such as alignment, grouping, contrast, etc will help guide your reader's eye, enabling them to read a large amount of information in a short amount of time. The second application of Richardson's comment is that a "bucket of data" is not an effective presentation of ethos. Instead, you'll have to leave out certain aspects of your identity in the interest of relevancy. I strongly urge you to read Theresa's response to my first Instructor Blog. She tells an excellent story about an applicant who did not consider the rhetorical situation. Her story makes Richardson's point perfectly and hilariously.

So how does rhetoric (strategic composition) manifest in each section? Let's break the resume down section by section with some specific advice. The textbook gives great and more thorough advice on all these sections, so read it carefully. My thoughts merely supplement the text.

The Objective Statement

One of the most frequent bits of feedback that I give students for their objective statements is "Where's the gimme?" "What's in it for me? One of the examples of an objective statement that Richardson supplies is:

OBJECTIVE: responsible, challenging position that will allow me to grow, realize my potential, and make a meaningful contribution to the achievement of corporate goals.

So, where's the gimme? The segment "make a meaningful contribution to the achievement of corporate goals" is a nice try, but the request for charity that precedes it renders it "too little too late." Certainly your *real* objective is to find a job that will be fulfilling, rewarding, and challenging, but your audience couldn't care less. Frankly, this is everyone's objective, so you need to come up with something a.) more unique, and b.) something that will be beneficial to your employer. What do they have to gain from employing you? In other words, ask not what the company can do for you, but what you can do for the company (my apologies, JFK!). A better objective statement persuades rather than begs by showing the "gimme":

"To obtain a position as an Elementary School Teacher in which a strong dedication to the total development of children and a high degree of enthusiasm can be fully utilized."

Ah! Wow! How specific! This objective statement shows clear "gimme," that is, it shows a clear knowledge of what the potential employer's needs are. Also, notice that it begins with "To" and is not a complete sentence. This is proper for the objective statement.

Education

Because you go to Purdue, your education section is probably your strongest asset right now. Later on, as you get more experience, education will slide further and further down your resume, but for now it will probably feature prominently at the top. At minimum, include your major, your minor, your degree, your anticipated graduation date, and your GPA if it's over 3.5. (If your major GPA is good, you can include that instead.) You can also consider including relevant courses, though do so only if you have taken interesting courses beyond the requirements. You can also include language skills or computer skills in this section. Include language only if you are comfortable speaking it in a technical job environment and include only computer skills that are unusual. Don't put "Windows" or "Firefox," for example. Only say that you are proficient with Microsoft Office if you truly are. If you know how to use MS Word, but don't know how to use Microsoft Office programs such as MS Access, MS Infopath, MS Publisher, and MS Excel, then you aren't proficient in MS Office and it will be bad news for you when your bluff is called.

Experience

Here's the meat and potatoes of your resume. This is the part that will sell yourself to the employer. You want at least three jobs on here, with at least two bullet points under each describing your duties, accomplishments, and skills. As far as order goes, it is up to you. Chronological order (most recent to oldest) is a traditional option, but you may wish to list your most impressive / relevant job first. If you have substantial volunteer experience that is relevant, you can include that if you call your section "Experience" or "Relevant Experience" rather than "Work Experience." Include your job title, the company, and the dates of employment at minimum (you can also include the location of the company.) The position you held is most important, and the dates are the least, so feature the position on the left side of the resume, where the eye scans first, and the dates on the right, where the eye may not reach in a 10 second scan.

As you write your bullets, keep several things in mind. First, use parallel active verbs. That means starting each bullet with a verb of the same tense. If one bullet starts with a verb ending in "ed," they all start that way. If one starts with a present tense verb, they all start that way. Here's an example of what not to do:

• Serving burgers
• Cleaned tables
• Responsible for keeping 'secret sauce' secret

Instead, your verbs should be consistent and your items should sound impressive:

• Provided customers with quality food
• Maintained a clean work environment
• Ensured the integrity of recipes.

Okay, so that last one was kind of bogus. Honestly, you'd probably be best just leaving that last one off. At any rate, you should be specific in your descriptions. A description like "worked in an office performing various tasks" is extremely vague and almost worthless. A description like "Provided customer service by answering 100 calls daily on 12 line telephone" tells us what you did. That's something we can sink our teeth into. Quantify when you can, especially if the numbers are impressive. "Served customers food" is less impressive than "Served 200 customers food daily and operated cash register totaling $1000 in daily sales." If you used any equipment, machinery, or software in your job, tell us what it was. If you taught or trained anyone to do anything, tell us. If you wrote or designed anything, tell us. If you implemented anything new or had a new idea, tell us. If you performed any special feat, tell us. If you got any special awards or accomplishments, tell us. Use these bullets to prove that you match the company's expectation, so if they want someone with "Strong oral and written communication skills," emphasize something you did on the job that proves this qualification.

Activities, Awards, Honors, Volunteer Work, etc

Resumes often include references to other activities, awards, honors, and volunteer work done by the candidate. This is great in moderation. If you are on the Engineers Guild of Purdue University, tell us. If you play guitar or do yoga or built a really cool treehouse or cradle sick puppies, no one cares. Keep this section relevant and short, and at the bottom of the resume.

Design

Your resume better look great. The HR people should want to marry your resume, or at least take it out to dinner. If it doesn't look good, you could have amazing experience and no one will read it. If information is hard to find, no one will find it. A good resume is easy to scan from top to bottom, makes good use of bullets, bold, and italics to create a hierarchy of information, and uses white space effectively. Use bullets where you most want to guide the eye, so avoid bullet overkill. Also, pay very, very close attention to alignment, which is key for scanability. Remember, good design is invisible, so don't go overboard with pink paper and glitter and perfume (see Elle Wood's resume in Legally Blonde). Just an elegant, simple, clean, easy to read design that uses the page well and is easy on a scanning eye. This is difficult to describe, which is why I am having you examine closely this PowerPoint on Resumes. You may want to view it in several sittings - it's a long one.

Many people have trouble making their resume fit a page. Unless you are applying to an upper management position, your resume must fit on one page, so here are some tips. First, you can lower your page margins in the Page Setup tab of Word. The standard for resumes is 1", but you can take them down to .8" or even .5" and get away with it. Make your margins consistent. Also pay attention to the spaces between points. All font should be at least size 10 or 11, but spaces between things can be as low as size 8 font, so you can adjust these, as long as you are consistent.

Spelling and Grammar

DO NOT MISSPELL ANYTHING ON A RESUME, EVER!!!! If you misspell something, save yourself postage and deposit your resume directly into the garbage. I was once working at a job when an HR person ran across a resume with a misspelling. She called everyone in, we all had a good laugh, and then she threw the resume away. I don't want this to happen to you. To emphasize this, I am not giving anything over a C to any resume with a misspelling. Considering that having your resume thrown away is the equivalent of an F, this is very generous.

Templates

Please don't use a template. I know that Word and other programs have templates for generating a resume, but the problem is that lots of people use these. You don't want your resume to look exactly like 100 other people's, because then you won't stand out. Follow design principles and resume format closely, but find some small way to make yours original and distinctive.

Scanable Resumes

Some companies, such as Purdue, scan resumes with computers that sort out resumes with key words from those that don't. So again, this emphasizes the importance of keywords. It is also important that scanable resumes avoid italics, underlining, or strange fonts that throw off the computer.(Thanks to Ryan Weber for content)

Good luck on producing your resume. Please let me know if you have any questions.