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A Winning Resume

By J. Jones, Expat-Adventures

 

When you are making your resume you want to keep it down to about one or two pages.  Each job you apply will be a little different then the other one so it is nice to tailor your resume for the specific job you are applying for.  One way to do this is make a resume with all of your experience and schools even if it comes to about twenty pages.  Save this resume on your hard drive and name it something like “master résumé”.  Now you can copy and past the parts that are relevant to the job you are applying for.

When writing your resume, do not get to specific unless the company is asking for experience on a specific type of equipment.  If you have experience on something that is simpler to what they want add it to your resume in a generic fashion.  For example if they want someone who has experience working on Dell computers write that you have experience working on PC’s.  During the interview when they ask if you have experience on Dell computers do not lie tell them no and let them know what kind of computer you have experience working on.  Your resume’s job is not to get you the job it is to get you an interview so you should write it as such. 

Remember that the fist person to look at resumes may not know to much about the job you are applying for.  Resumes usually find there way via headhunter or an HR department that has a list of key words to look for just like the software they use to search through them in the first place.  Because of this anything they specifically ask for in the job description that you have experience with should be placed at the top of your resume in a section that highlights your qualifications.  It is also good to have a format that allows you to place it right on your cover page.  They will see the key words they are looking for right off the bat and push the resume up to the next level.  This is important to do for the big companies because of the amount of resumes they get per position.  The people going through the bulk of the resumes will push through them as fast as possible and may not even read any of them before they discard them or pass them up to the next level.

It is not as important as it once was to have worked with one company for a number of years especially for overseas work.  If you worked a couple years on one contract and another year on another contract they do not care as long as you stuck around and finished your contracts.  Because of the fact you can get at least a 20% raze by changing companies the turnover rate is pretty high and it is rare to find someone who has worked over five years with the same company.  Usually someone who has spent over five years with the same company there are two things you will find.  The first one is they like there job.  The second one is they make enough money to cover there investment plans.

One more thing more and more people are turning to when writing there resume is a bullet format.  Instead of writing in paragraph form what your experience is use a bullet format that gives a quick description of your experience.  This allows the person reading your resume to clearly see your qualifications without having to look for them in a paragraph.  If you are going for an executive job being elegant may pay off but if you are applying for anything from a basic worker to a management position the bullet format is a really good way to go.  When you finished with your resume make sure that you have someone look at it for your.  As a mater of fact have as many people look at it that are willing to.  You do not want a misspelled word or something not making since.  Once you have your tailor made resume give the file a name other the “my resume” they are going to have thousands of “my resumes” in there data base.  So even if you just name the file “your name resume” you will be better off.  Save it to your computer in a file with the name of the company you are applying for along with the job description so when they call you to set up an interview you can look up there file and know what they are going to be looking for in the interview.  Make sure you save a blank copy of the same format so the next time you are going to write a resume all you have to do is copy and past the bullets from your master resume.