How to make your placement resume?
This is a step-by-step guide to making a great resume from scratch.
STEP 1: PUT ALL CONTENT ON PAPER/START WITH YOUR PREVIOUS RESUME
Your resume is essentially all the highlights and achievements of your life compressed into one (if not two pages). Naturally the first step is to dig through all your content and start stacking all points up.
Following table shows what most recruiters are generally looking for:
What recruiters are looking for?
Recruiters would be looking for candidates who have excelled (or have ‘spikes’) in at least one section and do well in all others. Sometimes you might have consistent experience which can be clubbed into a group, other than these buckets. E.g. International exposure, social endeavours or entrepreneurship. One can have a separate section, focussed at these points. You need to compensate for a particular stereotype attached with your background. E.g. IIT students are assumed to have decent analytical skills. So if you have great communication skills, it would make you a good candidate. Hence a balanced profile with achievement across these four buckets increase your chances of getting shortlisted.
A lot of students have already gone through the process of making their resume from scratch by their third/fourth year. If you are confident that you have exhaustively studied all achievements in the past and put them on the previous version of your resume, then it makes more sense to start with this draft. Follow the same process to write your new achievements since you made the last edit to your resume.
STEP 2: ORGANIZE AND PRIORITIZE
Once you have your rough content ready, organize it into the four buckets as mentioned earlier. Carefully assess your content to identify the stronger ‘spikes’ in each section. Although some people prefer to have their content organised chronologically in each section, especially in the work experience block, sometimes it pushes the more valuable experience behind. Put the the strongest point first in each section so that it is read first, thus making good first impression. Applying the same logic to your sections, have the stronger sections first.
STEP 3: FORMATTING
Start formatting early: Generally most students tend to look at formatting as the last box to tick. This is true with things like using ‘bold face’ to emphasize and formatting lines of your table. However, it is better to take a few decisions before starting out in interest of time. This includes choosing fonts. If you change the font at the very end, your sentences, which you carefully condensed to fit in a line, might just slip to the next line. This can be very frustrating.
Use tables: A good way to start writing your resume is the Invisible Table Method. Basically create a table with one row to enter each point of your resume. To insert dates, split the same row into two columns. You can hide all borders of the table for it to become invisible. This will save a lot of time when you are editing titles of your resume since your dates will never jump to the next line.
IIT Bombay specific tip: Always start your resume by carefully leaving the space for the CPI sticker above. If you have the option, try uploading it on the platform to freeze the blank space before you start.
Fonts: It is advisable that fonts sizes are above 10 pt. Although there are no restrictions for using fonts. Calibri or Times New Roman are most frequently used since the sticker from IIT Bombay goes well with these fonts.
Hierarchy: Maintain a clear hierarchy in headers and body of the content to ensure readability.
Margins: Make sure that you leave sufficient space as margin. Try to the match the width of the sticker. It is ok if you exceed it a little, but would only look odd if it is too large/small as compared to the sticker’s width.
Spend limited time: Finally, formatting can only improve how your resume is read up to an extent. Barring exceptional blunders, poor formatting won’t affect your chances of getting shortlisted if your resume is written well (strong points in an clear and concise manner). Similarly, you won’t make it to a shortlist solely based on exceptional formatting. Hence it makes sense to spend a limited time on formatting and focus more on the content of your resume.
STEP 4: DRAFTING AND REFINING INDIVIDUAL POINTS
When writing individual points of each section it is critical to remember a few key things:
Volume: Typically any point in your resume should not have more than 3 points. You might have one exceptional highlight in your college life (in IIT Bombay this is generally a strong position of responsibility). A frequent mistake that students do is spending huge estate writing this point. For someone who knows the PoR well, might not read all the individual points and would just skip to the next point in interest of time. For someone who doesn’t know the importance of this position, it might come off as the only thing you have done in your college. Thus is it better to restrict to a maximum of 4–5 points.
Also keep your individual points as concise as possible. Shorten any point that exceeds one line. If you have exhausted all your writing skills, but your sentence exceeds a line by a word or two, you can cheat a little by reducing the space between letters by 0.1 or 0.2 pt. . Just go to Format>Font>Character Spacing. Make sure you do not exceed 0.3 pt since that would expose your condensing and come off as shabby.
Impact: Use your points to show what difference you created instead of showing what was expected out of you. E.g. Instead of saying you were responsible for looking after the raw material management system, say that your actions led to a 25% reduction in raw material requirement. Quantifying your results gives it credibility. A good framework to construct individual point would be — “I achieved Y by doing X”. Another method to construct your points is the ‘PARADE’ method by Victor Cheng. You can read more about it here.
STEP 5: EMPHASIZING
Use ‘bold face’ to highlight points from your resume selectively. Select a maximum of 2–3 important words to bold per point. Make sure that the emphasised content is an independent summary of your resume. Ensure you get a gist of your resume in 10–15 second glance by just reading the part of your resume that is bold.
Highlight weighty achievements like Letter of Recommendation or Pre Placement Offer by positioning them distinctly.
STEP 6: REVIEWING AND ITERATING
Your seniors have gone through the process of making their resumes and therefore they know what worked for them and what didn’t. Have your resume reviewed by at least 10 seniors who have a similar section in their resume as you do. Also refer to senior resumes to save time when thinking of the best way to frame a particular point. A third person perspective would also throw light on typos and grammatical errors that escaped your attention.
Make sure you keep fine tuning your points to specifically bring out the exact impact required by your reader. An interesting or exceptionally strong point would make the reader go through individual points. But each point must be written in a gripping way so that the reader remember yours application.
There are several tests that your resume should pass before you submit it:
Print test: Printing your resume might change the darkness of the greys you used. Or your resume might look too shabby as compared to the on-screen version. In any case, take a print out and make sure that it looks exactly the way you envisioned it.
10 second test: Recruiters have thousands of resumes to sift through in a very limited time. It is said that they spend as less as 10 seconds on a resume. The key task is to convey everything you need to in this tight window. To check whether your resume passes this test, print out a few copies and hand them over to your colleagues or juniors who haven’t seen your resume/who do not know you. Ask them to glance through in 10 seconds and make a note of what points made an impression in this time. Make sure these are the most important highlights of your resume.
DOs AND DON’Ts
Include recent achievements. Do not include very old achievements from school unless these are very important.
Do not include things that don’t create an impact unless required. E.g. A lot of resumes write things like “familiarity is Windows and Linux OS” or “fluency in Microsoft Word”. This wouldn’t really count as an impressive achievement. It is better to not dilute the resume with such points unless a specific job profile really needs it.
~Mayuresh Patole
