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As a new college grad seeking a creative career, you should absolutely keep your resume to one page. In public relations and advertising, for example, there is value in saying more with less. Don’t feel the need to fill two pages with every detail of your short professional life—your resume should be short and sweet with room to breathe (read: white space). If Barack Obama can convey his resume in a few succinct lines, so can you. If you’re wondering what to cut out, try starting here.
What to Cut
What to Keep
Great advice - resumes quickly become boring and it's easy to include your entire life story instead of what's relevant to the company you're applying for.
Leave out the GPA while you're at it.
As someone who's looked at resumes of job candidates quite a few times, and the consensus for GPAs was something along the lines of "really? 4.0 GPA, wow...so...what?" We paid more attention to the relevant experience + if you had a degree, rather than the GPA since it wasn't an accurate indicator of success in the company.
I would also go through your qualifications and pair them down depending on the job. You can have a general purpose CV that has everything in it, but you can have specialized resumes for the different types of jobs that you are applying to. If you know C++ for example, but you are applying to a marketing job, you probably don't need to put C++ on your resume.
My advice here (and it's nothing others haven't written elsewhere countless times) is to have a few templates for different positions.
When you find a position you think you're a good fit for, drop that template into a new document and create a customized resume for that specific job.
Laser-beam focus will lead to a resume that makes you out to be the perfect fit. Then you can toss all the stuff you've done that isn't relevant to that job out the window.
I wonder if anyone has a recommendation for good templates for resumes? Most of the ones I find seem outdated, and I'm curious what is considered a good format these days.
Nicole - find a template online and then tweek it until it doesn't look like that template anymore. About 40% of the resumes I receive use the same 5 templates. It drives me nuts. These people don't stand out and can be confused for other candidates.
Here are some thing that I learned from reviewing other's resumes for MBA programs.
1. Your name and contact info should be 2 lines maximum with a max of 12 point font. First thing that I do is reduce their name down from 18 point font and put all the address info on 1 line
2. No need to include a line to describe your company unless it's a pagan commune (which I actually have on my resume). Either the reader heard of it or they didn't and no amount of description will help. Your resume is about you, not your company
3. bullet point formula is Skill + Result= Outcome. For example, Developed and present comments on a 2 blog posts which resulted in 3 people telling that I rocked.
For the template, I use this (hopefully this will come out but it's 2 lines of bolded info and then bullet points)
Bolded Company Bolded Dates
Bolded Position Bolded Location
Bullet Point 1
Bullet Point 2
The reader should be easily able to see where you worked (what most people care about). That's the main thing.
2 cents poorer,
DH
Just in case anyone is still reading, For my template, the Bolded Dates and Bolded Location are on the far end right of the page.
There was actually a pretty funny "How I Met Your Mother" episode about this.
@Carlos
I like the advice of having multiple different templates. I just customize my resume on a per job basis.
Just to comment briefly: my girlfriend worked admin at a lawfirm and when they were hiring (not always for lawyers) they were told to scan to the experience section and quickly toss the resume if they were unclear (hint to lies), or did not have experience. Focus on the experience, and I think Dead Hedge has a good point with the Skill-Result-Outcome section. Not bad.
I for one haven't prepared a resume (except internally for work projects) in years. These are all things I will take into account when/if I need to get back to resume tweaking...
Good luck out there.
Some great follow up tips. As for leaving off your GPA completely, I kind of agree. When I review resumes, it's probably the least important item I look at.
I still think it's important to leave on the GPA. A lot of positions I've applied to say "Minimum 3.3" or "Minimum 3.5" GPA, so it depends on the competitiveness of the company. Big firms definitely still want to see it and are more traditional. There are internships I've applied to that even require me to send in my transcripts....so it's still looked at a lot. Of course if your GPA is low, leave it out. But if it's high, I say show that off as well!
And, people always say to describe a specific action + result. But as a student, I don't have many measurable "results." I can't say that I increased sales by x percentage, or recruited x new people. And as an intern, it's hard to see how much impact you've made for the organization after only being there for a couple of months. How can a student include specific results in their resumes?
I still stick to my guns and say that a GPA on the resume is not required.
The reason I say that is that all the jobs that I have read resumes for never required a minimum of 3.x to get the job. If your GPA wasn't that, you obviously won't put it on your resume. If you do have your GPA on your resume and the job doesn't require it, then you run the risk of seeming pretentious. I graduated with a 4.0 but I never put it on my resume :-)
On the other hand, if a company required a minimum GPA, then they will request transcripts, thus your GPA will be on there anyway - there is no reason to waste precious space on the resume.
Now, in terms of things accomplished in jobs - my view on this is 'small victories'. No one expects a recent graduate, who's only had a handful of internships, to have shocked the world. Where you interned you may have wrote a report or done some analysis that in the hands of other people made something more efficient or saved money. In your academic life, you may have been a leader in a student organization, or you may have tutored people. These 'soft skills' are very important in a work environment, and they are something that school does not teach. I've seen resumes from people in their 40s that are switching jobs and one of the bulletpoints is "learned the value of humility" - I was shocked to see it as a bulletpoint, BUT it drew me in and I wanted to read more.
GPA may depends on the industry, but as far as I'm concerned, real experience is much more important.
Akhila, try to make your resume speak to you and only you. You wouldn't want to show something that the student next to you could use. Try to find your unique angle - any experiences that you took part in that make you different.
This is a great way to start your resume. Also, check out CAREEREALISM.com for resume and cover letter writing tips.
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