Resume Guide

Your objective should speak to what you bring to the table as well as what specifically you are looking for (internship, full time, and sometimes even what position and with what company). Use the job description to determine what soft skills (dedicated, multitasking, team player, etc.) they are looking for specifically and use this as a place to highlight a few of them that match your skillset. If you feel you cannot create a compelling objective, just leave this section out.

Your skills section should highlight specific and relevant skills to the job/industry in which you are applying. Use the job description or even several job descriptions from the industry you are looking to apply to in order to determine what technical skills and abilities you have that match. For example, Adobe Photoshop, MS Suite, C++, QuickBooks, Creative Writing, etc. Focus on skills and competencies learned that you can show throughout your resume. So, if you list QuickBooks in the skills section, there should be at least on bullet point in your experience section that shows where you applied this skill and how.

Your education only needs to include college level information. The fact that you graduated HS is a given now that you are in college. Feel free to include honors and academic awards in this section as well. Only  list your GPA if 3.5 or higher. If they want to know your GPA, they will ask for transcripts.

Your format should be consistent and easy to follow. All or your demographic info (city, state / dates, etc.) should align and be in the same place all throughout your resume for each experience. Try to stay away from 2 column resumes as they are not able to be read by most Applicant Tracking Systems

The content of your bullet points are the MOST important part of your resume. Focus on things you did that are impactful and produced outcomes / results.

All of your bullet points should attempt to meet this formula: Action Verb (see list here) + Quantity + Key Words = Results

 For example:

  • Trained new workers

VS.

  • Trained and developed 6 new full time employees on various policies and procedures of the company resulting in increased sales and customer satisfaction rates by 10%

-OR-

  • Managed day to day activities and long term projects for large corporate accounts

VS.

  • Managed day-to-day activities of 7 key corporate accounts while successfully completing 9 client projects, each with a budget above $500,000, leading to a $2.1 million increase in new business for the company

For each of your bullet points you want to try to answer the questions:

  • How? How many? How long? How much? How often?
  • Why? What was the reason? The impact? The outcome?
  • What? What were the results? What did I do specifically to impact the results?
  • So what? Is this bullet point relevant to where I am trying to go and the impression I am trying to make?

Additional sections such as research projects, awards, organizations, and leadership experience can help show relevant skills and competencies while filling in additional space on your resume.

Remember, the purpose of the resume is to give enough details to make the employer want to know more about you and call you in for an interview.

For creatives / creative majors: The attached resume template will help you to develop your content and create a document that can be submitted for roles through applicant tracking systems (Paylocity, Workday, Zoho Recruit, SmartRecruiters, Jobvite, etc.) that scan your resumes for key words and cannot read pictures, italics, symbols, etc. You can ALWAYS transfer this information into a more creative format but keeping this simple one will allow you to add and copy&paste info as needed.

If you are interested in having Career Development REVIEW YOUR RESUME, please send your updated resume as a MS Word Attachment (No shared docs, Google Docs or PDFs) for final review to hireapanther@cau.edu.  Don’t worry about it being perfect just do the best you can and we will go from there!