Act On Tips

To further improve your possibilities of being succesful in your search for any new career, the first steps have to involve getting your application back up to scratch.

You may find this list of hints helpful in working through your resume to ensure that it highlights the salient features of your candidacy to make you appear to be the best applicant.

1. Run-on sentences - Verify to make sure you do not have run-ons which might be really hard to read.
2. Steadiness - It is best to be consistent together with your number usage (dates, money, numbers), plurals, and abbreviations. As an example, dont list one date as 8/2004 and then list another date as 3/15/2004. Also, be alert to listing software consistently (abbreviation use). MS Word and Microsoft Outlook are both correct, however is not consistent.
3. Training portion - When you have a degree, list only the year that you obtained your degree. When you list your dates, (i.e.: 9/1998 to 1/2002) many resume-scanning systems will not recognize that you obtained a degree, only that you attended college for a period of time.
4. Ampersands - Ampersands (&) do not belong on a resume. There are a few exceptions. One exception is a well-known company name (AT&T). Another exception is well-known industry terms (P&L).

Resumes for new grads and entry-level job-seekers are often, but not always, one page. Most college career-placement centers tell students to limit their resumes to one page, notes resume writer sharon pierce-williams, 75 percent of whose business is writing for the college population.

Indeed, if there is one group that should strive for a one-page cv, it is college students and new graduates. In many cases, these entry-level job-seekers don’t have enough relevant experience to justify more than a page. Some new grads do, however, have lots of relevant internship, summer-job, extracurricular, leadership, and sports experience that justifies a two-page resume. Pierce-williams takes an unusual approach to new-grad resumes. “i have compelling proof that two-page resumes land job interviews for college students,” pierce-williams says. “length depends on extra-curricular involvement and leadership. It takes a certain ‘go-getter’-type student for a two-page curriculum vitae.