Simple Resume Writing tips
If you are writing resumes, and if you want to do a favor to people reading your resume and processing it to make a decision, follow these tips, that I gathered after recruiting about 100 positions in Uber as a hiring manager and as a bar raiser.
This is NOT a treaty on what you should contain in your resume. This is a simple request from the person reading your resume, to make it easy to read and understand.
Top 10 Rules of Resume Writing
- Stick to PDF format.
While sharing your resume, avoid anything else, as the person reading your resume may not have *your* preferred word editor.
Save from your word editor to PDF, send it to yourself in an email. Then read it, just to be sure. - Stick to max 2 fonts and max 2 colors.
A resume could be about art, but your resume is not an art piece with 6 fonts and 8 colors.
If you want to be conservative, choose one of these fonts [Calibre, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Georgia]
3. Don’t bold or italicize more than 5% (1:20) of words, or it will lose meaning, and it looks like a shouting contest.
Compare the following two sentences, and see how you feel.
PLEASE do not bold more than 5% of the words.
Vs
Please, do not bold more than 5% of the words.
4. Limit it to one page.
This is the most controversial advice I have ever given about resume writing. a. You don’t write a short resume because you have less to share, but you do so because your resume reader is going to spend one page worth of time, or less on an average.
b. If your resume is longer than a page, then the time spent will still be constant, and the person reading may filter stuff at random. This is a lot more harmful than you can imagine.
c. It is difficult but possible to write a one-page resume, even for 15+ years career, and will demonstrate brevity of language.
5. Maintain the text flow
It is very much preferred to have just one column, but exceptionally two columns, where a secondary column in the left margin summarizes or talks about tangential aspects could be pulled.
Any other format, and you are confusing the reader, about how they should be going from a column to another.
6. Maintain one chronological ordering
Reverse chronology is default standard. Start with your last/current experience or last 5 years. Spend 50% of space expanding on that. Spend 25 of time expanding experience before that. And so on.
In each of the ‘experience’ section, you put 30% of space on context (what was the company problem statement?) and 70% on your role and personal contribution.
7. Put educational experience short
Also put a delimitation between your professional career and schooling. A one or two liners is sufficient to talk about your professional education.
- Mention only the professional education. (BE, MS, BCA, MCA) High school name and location are irrelevant and it is seen as flex.
- Unless you did PhD or multiple masters, your education should be contained in two lines or less.
8. Maintain consistency
There are a lot of innovative ways of compacting your resume. Don’t go overboard with it, and at the least maintain consistency from one ‘experience’ section to another.
9. Get it reviewed
It doesn’t have to be professionally reviewed. Get some time from your friend, who isn’t already familiar with your professional work, and then ask him to go through your resume in under 2 minutes. Then ask him to write down every thing they would remember from reading your resume.
10. Focus on the job you are applying
If you are a manager, applying for management role, the least you should write is the number of teams, team size, team focus. If you are positioning yourself as architect, then talk about the strategic technological challenge you have identified and then solved.
This may seem an obvious thing, but do read the job requirement and try to honestly bring out the work experience that is relevant to that posting.
So these are my 2 cents, and by no means this is a comprehensive list about resume writing. But you know, something you can double-check before you send out your resume, and if you feel generous towards people who are going to read it.