RESUME & COVER LETTER GUIDE

Use a resume to:

 

• Respond to an advertised job vacancy
• Send to employers that interest you after you have researched the organization
• Accompany graduate school or other important application forms
• Present at an interview to a potential employer
• Submit to employers before on-campus interviews
• Accompany a request to a past or current employer or professor to write a letter of recommendation
• Reinforce a personal contact you have already established with a employer

 

How to develop a resume:

 

1.       Analyze the job description for skills and abilities – Read through job descriptions for the skills and abilities that employers are seeking.  Read through the descriptions and highlight the required skills, attributes and qualifications.  Use these words in your resume.

2.       Create a list of accomplishments – Take some time to think about your accomplishments: things you did well, enjoyed doing and were proud of.  Include education/training, volunteer opportunities, jobs, projects, school assignments, travel and group/team activities.  Describe in detail what you did, who you did it with, what equipment you used and what happened.  Quantify your results, if possible, and use commonly understood terminology. 

3.       Analyze experiences for relevant skills areas

4.       Write descriptive phrases – Using action verbs, write short phrases to describe what you did that illustrates each skill.  Be concise and specific.  Arrange the descriptive phrases in order of relevance to the position for which you are applying.

5.       Choose the appropriate format - There are several resume formats that suit individuals with different backgrounds with varying experiences.  Choose the one that is best for you:

 

Chronological:

This type of resume lists your experience in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent.  You may arrange your headings in various ways, depending upon what aspects of your background that you wish to stress.  This format works best when your work, volunteer, and academic experiences relate directly to the type of job for which you are applying.  It is preferred by most business employers.

 

Skills/Functional:

This resume highlights your most important skills or functions.  Headings are built around these areas.  Job titles, employers and dates of employment are listed in a brief section at the bottom of the page.  This format allows you to highlight skills, knowledge and relevant abilities to the position regardless of where and when you obtained them.  It works well when your work experience is not directly related to your career goal, you are entering a job market for the first time, or you are making a career change.

 

Hybrid:

This resume combines both the chronological and skills resumes.  It allows you to maintain the popular chronological resume while including a summary of your skills.  It can be organized in a number of ways, but most hybrids start with a skills summary followed by a list of experiences with descriptions in reverse chronological order.

 

RESUME DO'S & DON'TS

 

Do:

 

• Use good quality paper (at least 20 lb. bond) paper
• Use a readable font and print on laser printer
• Be specific in your objective, if you use one
• Emphasize results produced, significant achievements, recognition from others
• Quantify when possible and use specific examples
• Check the spelling of every word; make sure grammar and punctuation are correct
• Have someone else proofread your resume
• Get feedback from several people
• Begin phrases with action verbs such as "developed," "originated," "led," etc.
• Be truthful about your accomplishments
• Keep your resume to one page unless you have extensive experience related to your job objective

 

Don't:

 

• Use resume templates (i.e. Resume Wizard).  It is difficult to adjust sections and your resume looks like all other candidates who used the same template

• Begin phrases with "I" or use complete sentences
• Include personal information such as marital status, social security number, age or national origin
• Use flashy graphics or colored paper
• Mention controversial activities or associations
• List unrelated, detailed duties such as "opened mail" or "filed documents"
• Exaggerate your experience
• Use meaningless words or phrases such as "seeking a challenging position" or "seeking a position working with people"
• Start phrases in the experience section with "my responsibilities (or duties) included"
• Use abbreviations

 

 

 

REFERENCES

 

Because it is assumed that a candidate will furnish references upon request, it is unnecessary to put "references available upon request" at the bottom of your resume.   However, when an employer does request references, include them on a separate piece of paper with current contact information (names, titles, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail) of 3 to 5 persons who have agreed to provide recommendations for you.   

 

Some suggestions relating to selecting and working with your references:

 

·         Always ask the person's permission to use him or her as a reference.  Do not assume that the person will be willing to recommend you.  This courtesy is appreciated and may avoid later embarrassment -- or a negative reference.  "Would you be comfortable giving me a strong recommendation?" opens the subject.  Be prepared to hear a "no" or to deal with some reservations.

 

·         Give the person providing the recommendation a copy of your current resume.  In many cases, he/she will know you in only one context (in the classroom, as an advisor, as a supervisor in a work situation).  The reference may be stronger if the person has fuller knowledge of your other accomplishments.

 

·         Discuss with the person the type of position you will be seeking or share descriptions of specific positions for which you are being considered.  If there are particular skills or information you hope he or she will include in the reference, mention these.

 

SENDING RESUMES & COVER LETTERS ELECTRONICALLY

 

To send your resume as an attachment:

 

• Create your resume using a common word processing program

 

• Give the document a name the recruiter will associate with you (i.e. MillerJennifer.doc)

 

• Be absolutely sure your document is free of viruses.  Send it electronically to a friend to make sure it is easy to open, the formatting stays correct, and the document is virus-free.

 

To send your resume in the text of the e-mail message:

 

• The cover letter should appear first, above your resume

 

• Do not use bold, underlining, bullets, distinctive fonts, colored text, or html codes.  Use asterisks (*), plus signs (+), dashes (-), ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, and combinations of these to highlight text.

 

• Align all text to the left margin

 

• Using your word processing software, select "File-Save As" and change the "file type" to "text only."  Name the resume version something such as "resume text version."

 

• Re-open your text version and view the differences.  The text version is now ready to e-mail or paste into a web-based form.

 

• Send it electronically to yourself and to a friend with a different e-mail system to see how it will look

 

• Text resumes look plain and ordinary, but employers are used to this

 

To make your resume scannable:

 

Some large employers utilize resume database tracking systems.  They scan incoming resumes into a database (sometimes letters, too) and when they have openings, they can retrieve resumes using relevant keywords.

 

• It's okay to ask the employer if you should provide a scannable resume.  Some companies will indicate on their website if they scan resumes

 

• Include industry or job-specific keywords, especially relevant skills, understandable abbreviations, major, specific fields of study, and experience

 

• Use 10 to 14-point font size

 

• Do not use italics, underlining, fancy fonts, bullets, and multiple columns. 

 

• Use spacing or ALL CAPITALS for emphasis

 

• Do not center text

 

 

Resume Tips: 10 tips for writing a job winning developer resume

As seasoned job hunters know, the first step on the road to finding work is to write a resume that gets you the interview. Unfortunately, some of the traditional resume writing rules just do not work well in the software development industry. Here are 10 tips for writing a programmer resume that will increase your chances of getting the interview.

 

1: Provide a skills list up front

The hiring manager wants to know if you have the skills the company is looking for. An "experience" section gives managers a good idea of how much experience you have, but if you have a "skills" section at the top of the resume, their eyes go there first. Sure, you may be making it a bit easier for them to weed out your resume. But on the flip side, you might bring to their attention some skills they would otherwise overlook. At the very least, the hiring manager will appreciate the skills list.

 

2: Make the experience interesting

Most developers on the market have written a data-driven Web site or desktop application. To give a bunch of examples of these on your resume is not impressive. What does impress a potential employer is experience that has something unique about it, showing you've done more than just "Hello World" level work. If you've been working under unique constraints or in environments with high levels of transactions or zero tolerance for failure, that looks very good to the person reading the resume. So show me how your experience is different, and I will see you as different.

 

3: Root out grammar, spelling, and other common mistakes

Over the course of my time hiring, I have seen all sorts of grammar and spelling mistakes on resumes. One of the most embarrassing was when someone misspelled the name of the college he graduated from. Resumes do contain some unique grammatical conventions, and software development work in particular often revolves around acronyms or oddly spelled words. But that is really no excuse. Check your spelling and your grammar. This tip appears on just about every resume advice article I have ever read, but it clearly needs repeating.

 

4: Education counts, but not for much

Unless you are just entering the job market for programming or are applying for a very specialized position, your education is not terribly important. Sure, you need to put it on your resume, but list it last, please. The hiring managers who need or want to know about it can find it, and the others won't have to spend time on it. The world of programming changes often enough so that somewhere around seven years later, most schooling (except for "principles and theory" subjects, like mathematics or "pure" computer science) and certifications have little in common with the current working world reality.

 

5: Get to the meat, quick

The traditional resume format includes a lot of information that's just not needed, in the mind of the development manager. Your summary and possibly even the objective are two such sections. There really is no way to provide a summary that describes most programming pros in a way that is accurate, yet shorter than a resume itself. This is why most summary sections read like so much useless drivel: "Seasoned programmer with 10 years development," followed by highlights of the skills section. Thanks, but no thanks.

 

The objective is often (but not always) just as useless. If you are looking for a change of pace, it offers a great way to keep the reader from pigeonholing you based on your skills and experience. The intermediate programmer looking to slide into a senior developer position can safely skip the objective. The senior programmer who wants to become a software architect or a DBA needs to state an objective. So avoid the summary at all costs, provide only useful objectives, and let the reader get to your skill set as quickly as possible.

 

6: Formatting matters

The formatting of your resume is important. While the days of mailing resumes printed on premium stationery are long past, it is still a document that someone needs to read on a computer screen and on paper. That can be quite a balancing act, believe it or not. This is not the time to show off your inner Picasso, unless the position you are applying for is of a visually artistic nature. This is the time to enhance readability. That means using a larger font (10 to 12 points), a common font that all computers have (if your document format does not bundle fonts within it), and one that looks good both on the screen and off. My recommendations are Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, and Helvetica.

 

Use enough whitespace so that the document does not seem too dense, which will turn readers off. At the same time, don't waste so much space that it takes eight pages to print 200 words. Of course, the format of the file itself is important. My experience has been that 99.9% of the recruiters out there will ask for your resume in Microsoft Word format if you send it in any other format, so make sure that you can provide a document in the standard .doc format.

 

Always keep in mind that the resume is your primary tool for selling yourself. If readers can't consume the information in it, whether due to technical issues or readability problems, they will quickly move on to the next resume.

 

7: Be cautious with the length

Regardless of how your document is formatted, try to keep the length between two and four pages, unless there are extremely special circumstances. People who spend a lot of time doing short-term contract work can have longer resumes, and people just entering the job market can have shorter resumes.

 

Overall, it is tough to properly highlight your technical skills and more than one position in the traditional one-page resume format. Two pages should be the baseline for any intermediate or senior developer. But after about four pages, the reader's eyes start to glaze over. Much like your education, the experience you had more than seven or eight years ago is not terribly relevant, but the hiring manager does like to see an arc of increasing responsibility or project difficulty.

 

8: Properly document your history

Programming is not like most fields when it comes to employment history. For one thing, many programmers are contractors, which leads to an employment history that can look like a train. In addition, the dot-com bust is not too far behind us, and IT has always been an industry with a lot of bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions.

 

The problem is, no hiring manager likes to see a long list of short-term jobs. If your resume has a string of such jobs, with job titles that get bigger and bigger, you look like someone who has no loyalty. On the other hand, if the jobs seem basically the same (or worse, get lower on the totem pole), it makes the reader think that you may simply be unemployable. If you have a legitimate reason for the short-term jobs, make sure that the reason is obvious. For example, mark the contracting/consulting positions clearly.

 

9: Don't put the reader at legal risk

No hiring manager likes to be accused of prejudiced or discriminatory hiring. Not only is it unethical, but it is illegal. So hiring managers who are trying to do the job right will be familiar with the list of questions they can't ask an applicant. Your part of the equation is to exclude this information from your resume. The hiring manager does not need to know your marital status, ethnicity, nation of origin, age, religion, or sexual orientation. There are a lot of other things the hiring manager does not need to know, either. If you include these irrelevant details on your resume, the hiring manager will feel scared and skittish. Leave these details out, please.

 

10: "What a geek!"

In high school, you may have hated being called a geek. But today, you are trying to find work as a programmer. "Geek" is "gold" to hiring managers. Find a way to show them that you are smart, love programming, and are constantly growing, learning, and exploring new ideas. Talk about your relevant hobbies if you have any, like contributing to open source projects or volunteering to teach local kids programming. Let them know if you like programming or computers enough to deal with them outside of work.

 

It is a really simple equation for the hiring manager. While two candidates may be equal today, the candidate with passion will be far more advanced tomorrow than the candidate who treats it as "just a job."

 

 

 

 

Resume Tips: 10 Tips For Writing A Winning Resume

Your resume (or curriculum vitae), combined with the cover letter, are the master keys to opening the prospective employer's mind and door so that you can proceed to the next step in the process - the big interview!

 

RESUME writing TIPS AND STRATEGIES

 

Here are 10 valuable tips for anyone writing their own resume, or who is having someone else write one for them. These tips and strategies are an abridged version of what is contained in my new ebook, "Instant Home writing Kit".

 

1. Keep It Focused and Businesslike

 

A resume should be specific and all Business. Don't try to be too smart or too cute. After all, you are asking an employer to invest significant time and money by choosing you over many other similarly qualified people. Employers mainly want to know whether you are appropriately qualified and experienced, and if you have the ability to "deliver the goods."

 

2. More Than Two Pages Is Too Much

 

For students, recent graduates, or people with just a few years of experience, try to keep your resume to one page, two as an absolute maximum. Even a resume for someone with 20 years or more of extensive working experience, should not exceed three pages. In some cases, one or two "optional" pages can be referred to as "available upon request." These would be such optional annexes as a list of references or an inventory of recent projects and/or publications.

 

3. Get The Words and Punctuation Right

 

Make sure the grammar, spelling, and punctuation in your resume are perfect. Any obvious mistakes will hurt your credibility. Also, be sure to keep the language clear and simple. If you draft it yourself, have someone with excellent writing skills do an editorial review and a careful proofread of it. If a professional prepares it for you, such reviews are the responsibility of the resume preparation firm. Use an accepted English language "style guide" if you want to be sure of the finer points of word usage, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, etc.

 

4. Read Between The Lines

 

Customize the resume to match the stated requirements of the job that you are applying for, without being misleading. Review and analyze the job advertisement carefully. Look for and itemize the key qualifications, skills, and abilities the employer is seeking. Then identify certain key words that are usually repeated in such ads. Make sure that the wording and sequence of points in your resume reflect and address these "corporate terminologies" and "code words" as much as possible. When possible, study the company's annual report and Web site, and weave the themes and terms found there into your resume and cover letter.

 

5. Make Sure It Looks Good

 

Use a crisp, clean, simple presentation format for a professional looking resume. Just a bit of simple line work and/or shading, done with standard word processing software will do the trick. If you don't have the aptitude for this, there is most likely someone among your friends or in your office who can help you achieve a professional presentation. If not, seek professional advice. It won't cost much for a good simple layout, but it will make a world of difference to the product.

 

6. Show What You Can Do Today

 

Focus, first and foremost, on your recent experience that is most relevant to the position at hand. Less relevant and/or dated experience should be either eliminated or summarized in brief point form near the end of your resume. When reviewing your resume information, a prospective employer wants to know what you are doing now, what you have done recently, and how that relates to the job requirements of the post they are trying to fill.

 

7. Be A Straight-Shooter

 

Be completely honest. When people lie or "creatively exaggerate" on their resume, they are almost invariably exposed, sooner or later. Think about it - who really wants to get a job based on a lie(s) and then have to live in fear of eventually being found out? We often read in the newspaper about high-profile folks who get caught in a resume falsehood or exaggeration, and it isn't very pretty.

 

8. Follow The Instructions

 

Submit your resume in exactly the form that the prospective employer requests. If they say e-mail or fax is okay, do it that way. However, if they ask for it by regular mail, send it the way they ask. They must have reasons for requesting it in such a form and they are geared up to process it that way. If your resume is to be sent by snail mail, use the complete address that they specify, or it could go to the wrong office, especially in a large organization.

 

9. Don't Get Lost In The Mail

 

Be careful to respect certain conventions that the potential employer may require in your resume. For example, make sure that the cover letter mentions the exact name of the specific position you are applying for, and the competition number, if applicable. Sometimes an employer will request that the job title and/or number be printed on the outside of the envelope. You would not want to miss out on a job because you didn't follow minor administrative requirements.

 

10. Keep The Cover Short and Focused

 

In the cover letter, don't repeat what is already detailed in the body of the attached resume. It is a "cover" letter. It should be short and to the point. Introduce yourself first, and then briefly summarize why you believe that you have the qualifications and experience to fulfill the duties of the position better than anyone else. Express enthusiasm about the job and the company. Close by stating how you are looking forward to hearing more from them soon, and that you will follow-up if necessary.

 

The above list can be used as a "checklist" both during the preparation phase, and when reviewing your resume just before submission