12 Essential Tips for Resume Writing

It is resume writing day in my business communications course! To help my students, I have created a list of some essential resume writing tips--

1. Read the job description, take notes, and if there is a phone number for inquiries, call it.
2. Be honest. Do not misrepresent yourself or inflate your qualifications.
3. Use reliable contact information and an email address that uses elements of your name, e.g., [email protected]. Avoid using an address that highlights inappropriate activates and/or uses long numerical strings, e.g., [email protected].
4. Tailor your resume to the job that you want. Avoid using a boilerplate resume.
5. Add keywords from the job description. Practically speaking, many organizations use optical character recognition (OCR) software and keyword algorithms to vet candidates based on a keyword score.
6. Use a standard resume template. OCR software can and will go haywire when confronted with a template that does not conform with a typical page layout.
7. Provide a summary of qualifications and/or objective statement that uses keywords from the job description.
8. Arrange your information based on relevance. If you are a student seeking an internship, then leverage your education, skills, and activities. If you have been in your field for five or more years, focus on your experience and skills.
9. Create bulleted lists that are grammatically equal: sentences, phrases, and words. (Do not mix and match). More, at the beginning of each point use action verbs of the same tense. Don’t be afraid to use continuous tense (-ing) for your current position. 
10. Write your lists in a way that balances description with brevity. Use statistics in the form of performance measures to help make your writing more compact.
11. List relevant skills and provide a proficiency level (beginner, intermediate, and advanced). Avoid ubiquitous or irrelevant skills such as “email” or “Facebook.”
12. Proofread your resume. We all make mistakes. Do not depend on Microsoft Word or any other grammar algorithm to do it for you. Go line-by-line to ensure that you do not have any surface-level writing errors. Additionally, seek help! Have a friend or family member help you.