How to Create Great Resume

Resumes are still valuable piece of document to showcase your skills and abilities quickly and easily to your potential employer.

It is still the primary document that you can share with others to showcase what you can do and how you would be able to perform.

Many people still are not aware what key pieces of information should be included in a resume. I created this guide to to help people with clarifying what pieces of information you need to get noticed.

Here are the key areas you should focus on when creating your resume:

• Name contact details

• Professional Summary

• Skills

• Experience
  Education 

• Hobbies and interest

1. Add your key contact details

Make your name bold and big so it can be easily seen by people who read it.

In the contact details I recommend you include following pieces of information,

• Phone: Your mobile number or the best number to contact you

• Email: Your email address or the email address to contact. Please use a professional looking email address. Stick with gmail, outlook, or personal domain for your email address

• Location: The best practice is to insert just your city and state. Optionally, you can also put your full address if you wish. This is one is one truly up to you and your comfort levels.

• Social links: You use this area to insert your LinkedIn profile, blog or personal website. If you have a YouTube channel, you can also insert it here. This is a great place for you to insert anything that you created that will help you stand out.

2. Create A List of Professional Summary List

Utilize this area to indicate your years of experience, industry, key skills and accomplishments you gained over your career. You can use either bullet points or a couple of sentences to build this out.

Use the Professional Summary section to list key experiences and accomplishments.

Think: what do you want the recruiter to know right away?

Examples:

• “Project Manager with 10-years of hands-on experience managing and executing projects”

• “Salesforce Certified Administrator with 3 years of experience in implementing and configuring Salesforce”

Certified in PMP and Six Sigma Blackbelt 

Here are some examples:

Sentence: 

I am a Project Manager with 6 years’ “hands-on” experience managing projects, solving issues, and building high performance teams. Proven ability to develop project ideas, manage budget, create detailed plans and deliver projects on time and with high quality.

Bulleted: 

• Over 6 years of “hands-on” technical experience in designing, configuring and executing various Marketing Automation and CRM platforms such as Pardot, Marketo, and Salesforce.

• Over 7 years of experience in providing Digital Marketing Services, specifically in Marketing Automation, Social Media, and Content Marketing.

• Implemented over 20 Marketing Automation projects and provided technical direction to Enterprise and Medium-sized businesses.

• Deep understanding and experience administering CRM technologies such as Salesforce.

3. Add Your Skills 

In this area, you insert key skills that your employers could be looking for in the candidate.

I highly recommend you tailor this section based on the job you apply to. Go through the job description, and see if you have any matching skills that you can outline in this section.

This will help your employer see which skills you have acquired without needing to read verbose descriptions in the experience section. It will even entice the reader to keep reading further if they see skills that are relevant to them.

Here are few items to think about to add to the skills section:

• Software tools you learned or mastered 

• Programming or coding languages

• Key skills you gained over the years I.e. project management, business analysis, Data Analytics

4. Add Professional Experiences

I would say this is the most important section in your resume. In this section, you outline key responsibilities you have with your company and accomplishments you have achieved. 

Essentially, you need to show how you have helped companies succeed and the results you have achieved for them.

Here are the key areas you should add for each job you had in your career.

• Job title

• Company

• Employment dates

• Responsibilities  and key accomplishments

• Stats and numbers that shows your accomplishments

Another important thing you should remember is to only add jobs that are relevant to the job you are applying for. 

Avoid adding irrelevant jobs. Make your resume easy to understand. Only include relevant information for jobs you apply for. You don’t need to give a full background of your working career in your resume.

Make it targeted but easy to ready.

Ideally, I recommend multiple resumes based on the job you apply for. This way, you can have all the details necessary for that specific job type and not worry about adding key points. 

5. Add Education

For the education section, insert relevant degrees or or programs you have completed.

• Name of your school

• Degree or programmed attained e.g. Bachelors, Masters, Post Graduate

• Your grade or GPA (optional if your grade is not high enough)

• Any awards or honours you received while attending

6. Add Certifications

Certifications are critically important in the economics of the 21 century. For example, over 90% of hiring managers report certifications as an important criteria for hiring. (Source).

Some of the benefits of having certifications involve, validation of knowledge, performance improvements, higher earning power, enhanced academy performance, improved reputation, increased confidence and respect from peers. (Source)

Add certifications that you believe will help with your job search and your potential employers.

7. Add Hobbies and Interests

Adding hobbies and interests reminds companies that you have a human side and gives you an opportunity to connect with them at a personal level. 

Your hobbies and interests should show that you are an ideal candidate. Here some of the things you can add:

• Communities you are involved or build

• Speaking engagements

• Writing or blogging

• Mentoring or coaching

• Sports teams and other group interests

• Volunteering and charity work

If you are a recent graduate, you can add this section above the experience section.

List your degrees and programs in reverse-chronological order (most recent degrees attained first).

I do not recommend you add the year of graduation simply because recruiters can misunderstand your level of experience and your age based on the year degree attained.

8. Key tips and advice

• Keep your resume to 1-2 pages max.

• If you have to email your resume, -

• Interest are important it provides way to connect with you

• Continually refine and optimise your resumes

• Create multiple resumes for different job types and test which one gets most responses

• Double and triple check your contact information

• If you are a student with not much work experience, pack it with other experiences. 

  • Do you have any volunteer experiences or projects you participated in?

  • Start your own company until you find job and outline your responsibilities

  • If you are student, do not go over 1 page

• Use numbers whenever possible to show your responsibilities.

  • Ok: Managed the client’s Google Paid Search ad account

  • Better: Managed and optimized the client’s Google Paid Search ad account, increasing the ad ROI from 32% to 55%

• Sometimes you have admin roles duties and are not related to numbers. Don't need to use numbers in these situations

• If you emailed your resume, follow up. We all get too many emails, follow up and see if yours is considered.

• Don't take rejections personally. There is always an opportunity for everybody somewhere. Keep applying.

• Get somebody to proofread your email. Other people can catch your mistakes better than you can. Work with someone you know to edit and proofread your resume.