Constructing an effective resume is a time intensive process. When you're draft your resume, it's easy to fall into painstakingly analyzing the merit of every single bullet and phrase. You may also find that when you ask others to review your resume they give you seemingly contradictory advice on what to tweak, enhance or omit. This makes writing your resume not as easy as you might think, but the time and effort you spend will result in a gleaming version of your resume that you'll feel confident presenting to employers.

Below we break down the essential steps on how to construct an effective resume. By following these steps, you'll be able to construct a well-polished, targeted resume that will increase the likelihood that you'll be contacted by recruiters.

  What is the purpose of the resume?

The resume is a pure marketing document. It serves two primary purposes: (1) to get you the interview and (2) to help you think about your "story" and the major skills and accomplishments that encompass your professional experience. Going through the thought exercise of putting your story together will help you formulate your answers in order to show how you're a great candidate for X position. In other words, by thinking carefully about how to put your resume together, you are actually doing the beginning preparation for the interview.

  What makes a great resume?

Much like a commercial that grabs the viewer and compels him or her to buy a product, the resume should ideally grab the attention of the recruiter or hiring manager, and compel him or her to want to reach out to you as a candidate they can't pass up. A great resume will have several essential components that together will make the marketing message irresistibly compelling to the reader:

• Clean, professional formatting that makes the resume easy to read.
• Tailored bullets that highlight skills and accomplishments that transfer well to the position being applied for.
• Buzzwords that not only resonate with the recruiter/hiring manager, but that also will be picked up by resume scanning software that many companies use.
• Proper "signaling" on the resume, which is a combination of wording and carefully selected content that indicates a real interest in a particular function or career path.

  The Resume Components

In the sections that follow, we'll cover the resume components that you'll need to work on in order to construct your resume. We'll start with formatting basics and move section by section through the resume, so that you'll understand the key areas of your background to focus on and how to go about writing each section in an effective way.

Formatting fundamentals

The purpose of formatting the resume really comes down to one word: readability. The formatting simply allows the recruiter or hiring manager to quickly pick up the pieces of information that identify you as a good fit for the position they're trying to fill. Of course, the secondary benefit of a well-organized, nicely formatted resume is being able to convey your level of professionalism. If you care enough to put together a professional-looking resume, employers will assume you will be as equally conscientious on the job. We highly recommend adhering to the formatting basics below to achieve that professional look:

• Margin - Apply a minimum 1/2 inch margin all the way around the border of your resume. This will allow you plenty of space for your text without having the resume seem too full or busy.
• Font size - For maximum readability, the size of the font should be between 10-12 point. If the font is too large, the resume will come across as unsophisticated and amateurish (think about the font size of most early children's books). If the font is too small, it creates a challenge with comfortably reading the text, in which case the person may not want to go to the trouble to read it, even if you do have the right experience (the same holds true for poorly formatted resumes).
• Font styles - For ease of reading, selecting the right font style is also important. We recommend having your resume in either Times New Roman or Calibri for maximum readability. Tahoma and Verdana are also professional looking fonts that are easy to read.

Header

The header of your resume, in addition to conveying your essential contact information, is essentially a banner for your name. This means that your name should stand out and be differentiated from the rest of your header, either by bolding, CAPITALIZING or enlarging the font size for your name only (you can also use all 3 stylistic enhancements; 14-point font is recommended if you decide to enlarge the name). Other essential details we recommend for a professional looking header are below:

• Including only necessary contact information: your first and last name (you can include a nickname in parenthesis between your first and last name if it sounds professional, e.g. Doug for Douglas, Liz for Elizabeth).
• Centering the header at the top of your resume is preferred, but stylistically left or right justified is fine.
• Make sure your email is professional and appropriate.
• Unlink your email in your resume Word document before you print it out. It is fine to leave the email linked if you are emailing a soft copy of your resume to someone.
• Include a local address, i.e. the city/state/country, that you are focusing on geographically if you are doing a remote search. This gives the recruiter the impression you are readily available for interview.
• Do not use your current work phone number as the contact number on your resume.

Example header:

Education

More than simply listing your formal academic training, the Education section is really an opportunity for you to showcase specific aspects of your candidacy, such as high intellectual aptitude, team work and early leadership experience. Below we outline the elements of your education that should be emphasized, along with specific selling points that you can draw out from your undergraduate and/or graduate education:

Undergraduate

• Use the official name of each institution as it appears on the official school website.
• For all degrees, make sure to spell out the entire name of the degree (e.g. Bachelor of Arts instead of BA).
• List your majors for your undergraduate degree.
• You can include your GPA for your educational experience if it is 3.5 or above. GPAs below 3.5 are more than acceptable, but in order to truly highlight it as a strength, it should meet the threshold above. Also, make sure to keep the listing of your GPA consistent between your undergraduate and graduate degrees - it looks a bit strange if you only include your GPA for one or the other. Finally, your GPA has a specific “shelf life” when it is relevant - usually no more than 5 years from graduation for your undergraduate degree(s). With the passage of time, it's assumed you'll have “arrived” in your career, and your academic accomplishments will become less relevant.
• Highlight a few select major achievements and activities that you accomplished during your undergraduate experience. Notable highlights could be doing an undergraduate thesis, playing collegiate sports, holding a leadership position, or participating in an international work/study program.

Graduate

• Use the official name of each institution as it appears on the official school website.
• For all degrees, make sure to spell out the entire name of the degree (e.g. "Master of Business Administration instead of MBA").
• List your concentrations for any graduate degrees you have.
• GPA guidelines for undergraduate degrees also apply to your graduate degrees. The GPA "shelf life" for listing on your resume is no more than 2 years from graduation for your graduate degree(s).
• Highlight a few select major achievements and activities that you accomplished during your graduate experience. Notable highlights could be your graduate thesis, any leadership positions which you've held, or any professional clubs to which you belong.

Example education section:

Work experience

Your work experience makes up the core content of your resume, and is the section that recruiters and hiring managers will hone in on and scrutinize most closely. Therefore, this section needs to be very well-crafted and tailored to the types of positions (i.e. the functions) that you are targeting. Your work experience should focus on accomplishments and impact, while at the same time conveying the skills and experiences you have acquired in each position. Let's take a look at the key considerations for putting together a strong resume:

• Presenting your work experience - We highly recommend having your work experience presented in reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent experience at the top of the work experience section. This allows the reader to quickly understand your current position and employment history, which is usually the experience that will be most relevant to the job you're applying for.
• Dates of employment - Include both the month and year for each position you have held, which gives the reader an exact idea of how much time you've spent in the position. The smart recruiter will know that simply putting the years you have spent in each position tells very little about the actual time spent in the role. To illustrate, by putting 2000-2001, a person could have spent as little as two days in a position (e.g. December 31, 2010 to January 1, 2011) or two years (e.g. January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2001).
• Company descriptors - If your professional experience includes a few lesser known firms on your resume, it is helpful to provide a brief company descriptor in parenthesis on the same line as the company name. For example:
  
  ACME COMPANY (Global leader in food processing technology; revenue of $110M USD)
  
  
• Job title - Your title indicates not only the level of your most recent job, but also your career progression, when viewed along with your other past position titles. If you have progressed through several positions with the same company, the "bigger" titles indicate that you're a professional who is a strong performer and who brings solid work experience. If, for a certain position, you didn't have an official title, you can use a title that best describes the scope of your responsibilities. Be sure that this title is aligned with how your employer at which you held the position would describe your role.
• Bullets - Describing your key accomplishments or experiences in bullets is an effective way to make sure you are conveying the most important messages about your candidacy. We prefer succinct bullets over longer summary descriptions because bullets more immediately capture your accomplishments and the impact you've made. In order to craft effective bullets, follow the below best practice guidelines:
  • Most important messages first - For each position you have held, be sure to put your most important bullets first, which should be the accomplishments and skills that are most relevant to the types of positions you are applying to.
  • Two lines for each bullet - Two-line bullets are ideal to capture the detail around what you have done and the resulting impact of your work. One-line bullets are usually too short to provide detail of what you've done, while bullets that are more than two lines get to be too long and lose the key message you want convey in extraneous detail.
  • 5-6 bullets per position - For your most recent positions, you want to make your experience appear substantive. One way to do this is to create up to 5-6 bullets for the position. This should be possible if you've spent as least a year in a given position and made steady contributions during that time. If you have spent less time in the position, you may need to adjust the number of bullets downward, but include at least 3 to show you have made significant contributions, even in a short amount of time. If you have spent considerable time in a position (e.g. 5+ years), and have a large portfolio of work experience in that position, we still recommend keeping the number of bullets to a maximum of 6. Having more than 6 bullets has the effect of watering down and reducing the impact of each individual bullet, which should be avoided.
  • Using sub-bullets - Sub-bullets can be utilized for certain types of work experience where you want group activities or accomplishments together in order to make better sense and give a clearer context to your work experience for a given position. One example where sub-bullets can work well is for multiple projects or consulting engagements. You may want to describe each project or engagement with a primary bullet, which captures a short summary of your role, and then describes the details of what you did.
  • Using the SOAR method and strong action verbs - In order to keep your bullets focused and impactful, use the "Action" and "Result" from the SOAR method to describe your accomplishments. By using an Action/Result format, you make it easier to capture the key messaging for the bullet while keeping the bullet to two lines. Start your bullet with a strong action verb (e.g. led, created, managed, initiated) to describe what you did. Focus on providing just enough detail in the bullet so that the reader can quickly understand the context for your accomplishment.
  • Quantify your results - A large part of what makes your bullets impactful is quantifying your results by using figures such as percentages, sales revenue, cost savings, time savings, # of people, etc. This is an effective way to convey the scope of your accomplishments and show that you have the ability to achieve bottom-line results for your company.
  • Bullets should work together - Your bullets should collectively work together to display a well-rounded skill and experience set for the position that you are applying for. This means that you will need to select your bulleted examples carefully to make sure you include (as much as possible) the requisite skills and experiences that are required for the position you are applying to. This should be the case for the most recent position, and possibly the two most recent positions - at least those that appear on the first page of the resume.

Example work experience section:

Additional information

Although this section is commonly viewed as a “catch all” for information about you that is neither education nor work experience related, there are actually specific pieces of information you can include in this section to best present your candidacy to employers. The additional section is meant to show your interviewers another dimension (non-professional) of you as a person. It is an opportunity to connect with the interviewer and provide several conversation starters that will help you make a connection with him/her. This information could include the following:

• Certifications - Any recent professional certifications that are relevant to future positions you apply to
• Languages - List the languages you speak, using the following ranking to indicate your level of competency:
  
  Native, Fluent, Business, Conversation, Basic
• Interests - You can share some of the leisure interests you have (e.g. theater, travel, music, community service, etc.)

Example additional interests section:

  Putting it all together

These best practice guidelines for the resume will help you construct a well-crafted resume that is competitive for the positions that you are focusing on. It will take several revisions to arrive at a version that you are happy with, and this revision process is time intensive. However, this time will be well spent and greatly increases the likelihood that you will be called to interview. Once you have a working draft of your resume which contains the core content, check out Zoom's other resume guides to further refine your resume.