Resume & Cover Letter Tips

Resumes
A well-written resume is your best marketing tool. Written right, a resume catches the attention of prospective employers and systematically leads them through your skills and experience.

How do you write right? You want to sound clear, concise and focused. You want to look crisp and uncluttered. No one style of writing a resume is correct. Under the Career Center area on the main page of the website, we’ve illustrated several styles for the resume that are pleasing to the eye and effective. Please feel free to download these for your personal use.

When writing your resume, avoid the temptation to sound important—which usually backfires. “Furthermore, I utilized the management training modules for self-advancement” sounds a lot better when you simply say, “I attended training courses to develop my management skills.” Instead of stuffy words like utilize, nevertheless and give consideration to, just day use, but and consider.

Once you’ve mastered a good resume, keep it up to date so you’re ready when the phone rings. You can focus your time and energy on the interviews—and acceptance letter!

Resume Templates
There are lots of ways to write a resume—from chronological to functional (skills listed but not necessarily connected with a particular employer). Today, interviewers seem to frown on functional resumes, assuming you’re hiding something—your age, firings, or some other information. Below is an overview of the key components of a chronological resume.
Name
Address
Telephone
E-mail: Only professional looking addresses; no .

Professional Objective: Optional—this information is often better left to the cover letter. If you do put it in your resume, avoid generic statements about “potential for growth” and “putting your skills to work.” Get specific.

Summary of Qualifications: Feature highlights that, like a movie trailer, will make people want to read on. Customize for the specific job. Get creative—though stay honest—with expertise, traits, distinctions and even quotes and testimonials from employers.

Experience: Include employer, location, years worked (not months—more on that in a minute), responsibility statement (keep it brief; include industry key words) and accomplishments. Make everything pass the “so what” test. Show the positive results and successful outcomes you generated. Use bullets to make it easy to read.

Education: Starting with most recent, list degrees, university or college, city, state. Dates are not necessary.

Professional Development & Training: Illustrate your interest in lifelong learning and personal development.

Technical Skills: List skills such as Excel, Photoshop, PowerPoint, HTML, etc.

Military (if appropriate)

Affiliations/Volunteerism: Keep them relevant, but show you contribute and care.

Other: Include foreign languages, honors, publications, certifications, professional licenses, etc.

Don’t list personal hobbies or interests not relevant to the position. And no need to write: References available upon request. They’d better be!

A Little Poetic License
Honesty on a resume is essential. In fact, some states have enacted resume fraud legislation. That said, you don’t have to reveal every wrong turn or short stay.

• If you worked somewhere fewer than three months, you may want to omit that position from your resume. More than six months, though, and you need to list it.
• Because you don’t list the months you started and ended employment, you get a little wiggle room. This also helps eliminate employment gaps from your resume—again, as long as they run fewer than six months.
• When you worked several smaller jobs at one company, pull all those together under the main job title. This will reduce the impression that you are a job-hopper and save space on the resume.
• No college? Omit the education category completely. A little college? List it without designating any degrees. If you want to be scrupulously honest, mention what you majored in but state you did not finish.

Cover Letters
Every resume needs a cover letter (though you’ll hear arguments to the contrary). This brief letter offers you a chance to introduce yourself to busy executives. Creative and professional cover letters encourage readers to delve a little further in who you are (i.e., read your resume)—and call you for a job interview.

1. Headlines. Similar to the subject line in an e-mail, the headline tells the reader what your letter is about. You can list the job you are seeking or something more interesting about your skills. Insert it between the city/state/zip and salutation.
2. Be specific – if at all possible, address the letter to a person, not a title. Call for the name of the human resources manger or the person handling the interviews. Use “Dear,” the appropriate honorific (Ms., Mr., Dr., etc.), and the person’s last name.
3. Start your letter creatively. While you want to be clear about the position you are interested in, you don’t have to start the letter that way. Tell a brief story about how you fixed, added, or changed things for the better.
4. Skip the temptation to tell the reader how appealing the job position is to you. Of course it is or you wouldn’t be contacting the company. Everyone says this—you don’t earn points and you lose individuality.
5. Think about your readers’ needs—not what you want them to know about you. What skills do you offer that can make their lives easier? What pain can you solve?
6. Cover letters need to complement your resume—not duplicate it. It’s more of an introduction and summary statement.
7. Make the letter easy on the eye. Subheads, bullets and white space break up copy so that readers don’t just see a sea of words. Which means they are more likely to read further.
8. Be brief – one page is all you need.
9. Use the six Cs of strong communication: conversational, concise, clear, centered, creative and complete. Conversational is not casual or formal; it’s straightforward with a relaxed tone. Write clearly without jargon or corporatespeak. Cut out extra words or rephrase to make it more concise; e.g., substitute routinely for on a regular basis. Use positive words to reflect your self-confidence, interest and professionalism. And double check that you’ve included everything.
10. Proofread, go for a walk, proofread again. Typos seem to jump off the page when you take a break. Proofread a hard copy—we catch more mistakes off screen and on paper. Even if you’re filing your cover letter and resume online, proof a hard copy.
11. Print on high quality letterhead. If you don’t have letterhead, use high quality resume paper with matching envelopes. Be sure to list your contact information under your signature.

Online Cover Letters
If you are sending your resume via the Internet, use this format with a few tweaks.

1. The headline becomes the subject line. In this case, you may want to write something more creative to differentiate yourself from the thousands of other resumes arriving that day.
2. Delete the date and recipients’ snail-mail address.
3. Delete spaces for your signature.

Otherwise, the salutation, body of the letter, subheads and contact information still work.