How to Make Best Comprehensive Resume or Curriculum Vitae (CV)
A comprehensive resume or CV highlights your functions, skills and experiences in a clear chronology and is ideal for anyone looking for a career change. It will have several required components.
In this article you’ll learn how to make your comprehensive resume content, writing, and design.
Open Strong Objective
The first 20 words of your resume are critical because that’s the rough equivalent of what a person can read in six to seven seconds the average time a recruiter spends reading your resume.
Your email and contact details at the top are exempt from this, mainly because recruiters won’t bother with them until they’ve vetted your application.
With 20 words, that’s just enough for the first one or two bullet points of your professional summary. Use these points to summarize your expertise and career progression.
For example:
“Full Stack Engineer with 15 years combined experience in iOS development, web development, and Internet of Things (IoT).”
That’s one bullet point with a job title, length of tenure, and a list of key skills all in 18 words.
Add Side Projects to Your Resume
Side projects show that you’re a hustler, and that you use your free time to acquire new skills to improve the quality of your work.
Side projects, including freelance and volunteer work related to your job works best in increasing your credentials. But you could also list gigs indirectly related to your day job. For instance, working as a
property manager part-time builds administrative and customer service skills, two skill sets transferable to many industries.
These side projects could be listed along with your day jobs to show your growth in and out of the office. But if you have multiple or simultaneous gigs, it’s better to list them in a separate section to avoid
confusing recruiters with your work timeline.
Leverage Failure on Your Resume
Stories of failure are the last thing recruiters expect to see in a resume. Your application is guaranteed to stand out if you share one of your less than perfect moments.
But you have to be careful in doing this. The failure itself is just the bait to get their attention. What comes after that is more important. Either they get a bad vibe from you and stop reading your resume, or they continue reading.
Share a short story of a project or task that failed with one of your previous employers. Then emphasize what you did to correct it, how long it took to fix, and the result. Just don’t overuse this strategy by sharing one fault per job title in your employment history.
Another reason this works is because a recruiter will think you’re less likely to commit the same mistake, and waste company resources in the process.
Show Off Soft Skills on Your Resume
Employers value soft skills more than you realize. While the job market is better today and a tad friendlier to fresh graduates, many employers feel they lack the skills needed to thrive in the workforce.
Below are some of the skills they think applicants lack, according to Career Builder’s survey of 2,186 hiring managers and HR professionals:
- Problem solving – 48%
- Leadership – 42%
- Teamwork – 39%
- Written and verbal communication – 37%
- Creative thinking – 35%
Demonstrate these skills in your resume. If you’re not sure how to write about your leadership and problem solving skills.
Use the Right Resume Verb Tense
Don’t write present tense verbs for your previous job, and don’t write past-tense verbs for your current jobs. It sounds obvious but a lot of candidates forget to check verb tense consistency in their resume.
Granted, some hiring managers won’t notice this. But you can’t write ‘attention to detail’ as one of your soft skills then get caught with mismatched verb tenses on your resume. There’s no coming back from that.
Formatting and Design
If you are formatting a resume before you write it, be sure to pay attention to how the information looks on the page and adjust as needed.
Here are the key steps for formatting a resume:
- Apply appropriate margins
- Select a professional, readable font
- Make your font size 10 to 12 points
- Feature section headers
- Use bullet points
- Ask for feedback
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