What's the best resume?

If you search for advice on your resume online, ask a friend to review it, or even discuss your resume with a recruiter... you're going to get ideas 5 ways to Sunday on how to make it "the best". And that's the thing; no resume is ever going to be "the best". Some like it one way, others like it another... so at the end of the day, it’s up to you- the candidate. Can you stand behind what you're sending out there? Does it represent you effectively? Will it help you get to where you want to go?

Everything below represents what I've seen work in my company and with my clients... I doubt the same advice holds true for everyone else out there.

When I searched for resume advice just now, I came across a pretty great article from Forbes. It lists the same things I tell candidates all the time. This advice I give is from the "knock down- drag em out" experience I've gotten over the last few months as a new recruiter in a bullpen full of veterans.  While this Forbes list is just about spot-on, I'd like to add my 2-cents (which in fact is gathered from those who have been doing this a lot longer than I have).

#1- The Forbes article talks about a "one size fits all" and how that doesn't cut it in the world.  There is some merit there. If you are applying for different types of jobs, you'll probably want to highlight different experiences from your career.  In my world- an EA resume looks a lot different than an Operations or Office Manager resume.  One person can fit both bills but the resumes have to effectively represent RELEVENT experience. Along that note, your positioning on your resume ("I've planned travel, meetings, and schedules for executive level individuals ") has to match your positioning in your interview ("I'm an EA and I love to manage the schedule of my Executive") or you'll never be taken seriously as a front-runner.

#2- Forget the objective. This is 100% true. Your resume, while it represents the experiences you've had, needs to come as close as possible to reflecting the position you are seeking. That objective should be clear without your laying it out at the top. Each job you've had should have a handful of bullets describing your duties. As much as you can, tailor each of these responsibilities to the job you're seeking. If you're looking for an HR role, your resume shouldn't be compromised of completely marketing tasks. If that's all the experience you've had, and you've never been involved with anything on the HR team, maybe you should rethink your job search strategy.  Just sending your resume alone will not be effective in completely changing your career- you'll have more work ahead of you to succeed in a 180-degree turn like that.

#3- "Space Equals Importance". Your contact info should be on the top, followed by either your education information or your most recent job (depending on how you'd like to position yourself), which should be followed in reverse chronological order by the job before that. I've seen some resumes that first lay out a summary of experiences then list the jobs and the years... those don't usually work for most companies I work with. They want to see each job, the dates of employment (months help!), and what you did at each one. There's no way one list of experiences can appropriately represent your development through your career, or tell your story effectively enough for someone to be interested in you. You want anyone who receives your resume to be able to figure out who you are, what you've done, and what you want to do pretty quickly after looking at it.

#4- Avoid fancy stuff on your resume. Use Times New Roman. Have appropriate white space. Appropriate formatting can be the first deciding factor of whether someone opens your resume at all.  If your resume has a good story, no misspelled words or misaligned bullets, correct tenses, and shows experience that is relevant to the job in question it won’t NEED a photo of you or cute little clip art star…. Let your experience do the talking. This goes completely against the idea that you want your resume to stand out but sometimes those superfluous additions make your resume stand out for all the wrong reasons. Anything out of the ordinary might make it seem like you're trying to make up for something... you don't want to raise red flags before they even read the first line!

#5- Quantify. Since I work with Administrative roles for the most part, there's not a ton that can quantified (unless you want to spell out exactly how many international trips you've planned for your boss- which I don't recommend). But what might help is being SPECIFIC. Where have you planned travel? What Microsoft programs are proficient in? What is your typing speed? Which databases have you used? You never know when your resume will get you an interview because you once worked with a Russian Satellite office and you didn't even know that the CEO who needs the assistant has family in Russia and wanted someone who has experience planning travel there?

#6- Get a second and third pair of eyes on that bad boy. I don't suggest seeking advice from your mother, and your former professor, and your significant other on how to set up your resume, but they should look over the end product for errors. Common things I've seen are mismatched tenses (you "supported" in your last job but if you are currently working that should say "supports" or "support"), misspelled computer program names (PowerPoint, QuickBooks, Salesforce, etc), formatting errors (extra paragraph line, not enough tabs, an extra bullet at the end of a list).

#7- Omit extras. Sometimes it’s nice to see that a candidate likes Boating... but don't tell me your life story on that piece of paper. Resumes shouldn't really include anything other than your contact info, education, former jobs along with those responsibilities, technical and maybe other skills, and maybe extracurricular activities or volunteer experience (depending on how much space you have left). Anything else should have an express reason you included it (a thesis that sparked your interest in this field, etc).

#8- Size. Keep your resume to one or two pages, and in that, if you graduated in 2013- you definitely don't need 2 pages. If you’re having trouble with that, see #7.


If you've been sending your resume out to a ton of job postings and you're not hearing anything back, take a look at your resume in relation to this list. Are you showing off relevant expereince to the job? Have you made no mistakes? Does your story make sense? Sometimes its about timing and luck, but you should eliminate all the barriers to luck and timing that you can.