Resumé Building Guide

Resumé Building Plan

Big-Picture View

This guide explains the basic structure of a resumé, how to build your own, and how to customize your resumé to each job. As you read, I suggest pulling up the accompanying Resumé Template in another tab.

Sections Explained:

Resumés are broken into sections. They should generally be in the following order:

• Summary: A few short sentences describing who you are professionally
• Key Skills: Lists hard and soft skills that you possess
• Experience: Describes your previous work experience
• Education: Lists completed and unfinished degrees
• Misc sections:
  • Volunteer work
  • Technical skills
  • Honors and awards

In the past, common advice was to limit your resumé to one page. Now that resumés are typically submitted electronically, having a two-page resumé is fine (but don’t go beyond that).

Questions To Ask Yourself:

• What does your ideal job look like?
• What’s the core important message you want to convey?
• What are your core strengths?
• What are your skills?
• What accomplishments do you want to share?

If uncertain about the types of jobs you’re eligible for, go to any job board (ex: Indeed), type in some skills/attributes you have, and look through the jobs that come up!

Core Fundamentals:

1. Focus on what will make the hiring manager want to interview you.
2. Show how your experience fits the job description
3. Keep it concise
4. Keep it ATS-friendly (we’ll get to that later)
5. When applying, export your resumé as a PDF

Building Your Resumé

Resumé Template

An example resumé is available here. Click on File -> Make A Copy to create a version that you can fill out with your own information

The Framework: Analyze 5

This is a structure for building a clean and targeted resumé. Do these steps before writing your resumé

If you’re applying to multiple types of jobs (for example, if you’re applying to retail and custodial positions), repeat this framework for each type of job.

1. Go on a job site (ex: Indeed) and find 5+ jobs in that category
2. Highlight any skills you have that are in multiple job descriptions
3. As you write your resumé, focus on those skills! Make sure they’re especially:
   1. Emphasized in the “Summary”section
   2. Demonstrated in the “Experience section

Header:

The top of your resumé includes some basic information about you, including:

• Your name
• Your job titles (optional)
  • Doesn’t need to be your exact job title - if your title is “Coffee Shop Associate”, putting “Barista” will be clearer
• Your location
  • If you haven’t relocated yet, I recommend listing this as being in the location of the job, as companies often filter out applicants outside the area
• Your contact information
  • Phone number
  • Email
• Relevant link (optional). Choose one of:
  • Personal website
  • LinkedIn
  • GitHub

Section 1: Summary

First bullet point: Who are you professionally? What do you specialize in?
Following bullet points: Describes your most important skills for this job
Customize to the job by using adjectives from the job description

Section 2: Key Skills

• Using the Analyze 5 framework, build a list of 9-12 skills
  • Have a mix of soft and hard skills!
• Prioritize skills that are in the description of the job you’re applying to
• Since people read left -> right and top -> bottom, put the most important skill in the top left. From there, go across.
• This is easy to modify for individual jobs. Make sure you do!
• If you’re having trouble thinking of skills, search for lists of common hard and soft skills like this one

Section 3: Experience

• Goal: Show you’re the best choice for this job
• Should include core duties and achievements
• Order in reverse chronological order (most recent job first)
• Formatting suggestion: Have a sentence or two as an overview followed by bullet points with key accomplishments
• Start bullet point with your impact, then describe how you made the impact
• Bold the portion where you talk about the impact you made
• Trouble writing bullet points? Try using the format “Achieved X by/to Y by doing Z
• Make achievements concrete whenever possible
  • “Increased efficiency by 150%” is better than “Increased efficiency”

Section 4: Education

• If recently graduated from college, put this section before “Experience” section
  • Can also list relevant coursework
• If you have multiple degrees, list in reverse chronological order
• If you transferred during your degree, only list the school you graduated from
• If you left before graduating, list it anyways!
  • Example: “Coursework completed towards Bachelor of Science in Psychology”
• If you’re still in school, include your planned degree + expected graduation date
• If you’ve graduated from college, don’t include high school graduation info

Sections 5+:

All the sections below are optional

• Volunteer Work: organization, dates, title (if applicable), a sentence or two about the work
• Technical Skills: software platforms, tools, programming languages
  • Technical skills in the job description should go in the “Key Skills” section
• Honors and Awards
• Formal Recognition
• Military Service
• Early Career Experience: internships, very old jobs
• Personal Interests: hobbies. Only include if somewhat related to the job
  • Ex: you’re applying to the Seattle Aquarium and your favorite hobby is tidepooling

Using AI?

If you want to, AI can be useful for creating your first draft. However, you should not use it to create your final resumé.

Pros:

• Saves time
• Can create a good starting point

Cons:

• May be missing important info since it only analyzes what you share with it
• May not be accurate
• Sometimes, HR can spot AI resumés

Some resumé-building AI tools exist, like Rezi, Zety, Jobscan, and Kickresumé

If you’re using AI to build your resumé, review everything thoroughly!

Reviewing and Customizing Your Resumé

Reviewing Your Own Resumé:

1. Read the whole resumé out loud to yourself to catch errors and clumsy wording
2. Remove unnecessary words
3. If it feels too dense, remove achievements unrelated to desired job
4. Check spelling line by line. Pay careful attention to homophones (sale vs. sail)
5. Check your grammar. Look for the following:
   1. Sentence fragments
   2. Run-on sentences
   3. Punctuation errors
   4. Inconsistencies in tense
   5. Jargon
   6. Capitalization
6. The first time you use an acronym, make sure you spell it out fully
7. Check for consistency in formatting the following:
   1. Fonts: use one simple font throughout
   2. Spacing
   3. Text size
      1. Body text should be either size 11 or 12
   4. Bolding
   5. Hyphenation
   6. Margins: should be 0.5-1”

ATS Friendliness: IMPORTANT

All resumés have an initial scan performed by an automated Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The ATS scans your resumé for skills, experience, and education to see how well it aligns with the job description. Resumés that do not pass the ATS check are discarded.

Optimize your resumé for an ATS scan by doing the following:

1. Use a simple format! Complex formats can throw off the ATS
   1. Use only one column
   2. Use a common font (Ariel, Helvetica, Tahoma, Cambria)
   3. Don’t use colors, images, or icons
2. Ensure the keywords in the job description are present in your resumé
3. Modify your job titles
   1. Only do this if you have experience with a very similar job in the past, as in the scenario below!
   2. You’re applying for a job with the title “IT Technician”. You’ve previously worked as a “Technical Support Specialist” with the same core duties as the job you’re applying to. List your old title either as “IT Technician” or “IT Technician (Technical Support Specialist)”.
4. If you’re missing required credentials, consider reaching out to the recruiter/hiring manager, as you’ll likely be auto-filtered out by the ATS

Use a site like Jobscan to check if your resumé passes the ATS check. If it’s 60% or more, you’re all set! The goal isn’t to get a high score - you just have to not get auto-discarded. If your resumé doesn’t get over 60%, try to customize it to the job a bit more.

Additionally, most sites will make recommendations to improve your resumé. Take their recommendations with a grain of salt, especially those in the “Key Skills” section.

Customizing Your Resumé:

It’s a lot of work, but you should customize your resumé for every job you apply for. It’ll make you much more likely to get the position. To quickly and easily customize your resumé, use the following process:

1. Look at the job description and highlight skills + experience you have
2. If your header section includes job titles, customize those titles to be closer to those of the desired job
3. Adjust the “Summary” section to focus on the skills in the job description (both hard and soft)
4. Remove any irrelevant skills and achievements from the “Key Skills” and “Experience” sections, add any relevant ones

Addressing Common Issues:

Career Gaps/Unemployment

Good news - there’s much less stigma around career gaps than there was in the past! Still, it’s best to assume hiring managers will notice and be concerned, so proactively address it by explaining the gap briefly and unapologetically. Here’s some ways to do that:

• Put a “job” in the “Experience” section that’s along the lines of “Intentional Career Break”, “Caring For Family Member”, etc.
• If you’ve had a job since the career gap, add a note in the “Experience” section for the following job that’s something like “following an unplanned layoff, accepted a role as X”

Minimal Professional Experience:

If you don’t have much experience, you may need to use a modified version of the Analyze 5 framework from earlier. Try the following:

1. Find 5+ job descriptions you’re interested in and eligible for
2. Write down all skills you have that are present in any job description (including ones not gained professionally)
3. Focus on those skills when writing your resumé. When possible, describe times you’ve demonstrated those skills

You can also bulk up your resumé by doing the following:

• Putting volunteer experience + internships in the “Experience” section
• Consider creating a “Leadership” section and listing social things you’ve done

Career Pivot:

If you have considerable work experience, but are trying to move to a new field, try doing the following:

1. Focus on the core duties/goals of the desired job in “Summary”
2. Add a line in “Summary” that you’re intentionally pivoting from X to Y
3. Make sure Key Skills are relevant to the desired job
4. If you’ve recently completed a degree as part of your career pivot, put “Education” above “Experience”
5. Split up “Experience” into “Relevant Experience”, which includes all experience related to the goal position, and “Additional Experience”, with work in your old field