Tips for writing a good resume

Looking for new job opportunities may be hard and unpredictable. While you want to present all of your working experience you also want to stand out your top skills and maybe languages that you know. You have seen so many resume templates that you’re not sure which one to follow. ozOn has picked the best tips on how to write your resume knowing that recruiters may not be the first ones to actually set their eyes on it. New cutting edge technologies rely on CV parsing, and technology will be the first one to see and score your resume.

What is a CV or resume?

It is a document with detailed professional highlighting of a person’s working experience, education, and skills. It is a must in almost every job application and we are free to say that your resume is your passport to the world of business.

Choose legible and professional fonts

When writing your resume you have to know that it is critical that your resume is readable and easily understandable so you would want to select clear fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, or Georgia.

Carefully choose the font size. You should keep your text between 10 and 12, but for your name and contact pick font size between 14 and 16. Use single spacing as well.

Write dates in full

Sometimes it’s hard to understand and distinguish candidates who don’t put write dates for their working experience or education. Putting only years can seem unprofessional, even undetectable for CV parsers, so we suggest sticking to one date layout through your resume (e.g. 10/05/2002 or March 2009).

Use sections

To make it easier for reading, put your text into sections like contact details, working experience, and education and distinguish section headers from the rest of the text by bolding it.

Lay it in order

It is best if you put your CV in some logical order so that anyone can read it carefully and chronologically without struggling to fetch information that is all over the place.

Starting with your contact info is the best, you could put your working experience next, then education, important skills, licenses, certifications, and so on.

Additionally, you can order your experience and education in reverse chronological order to highlight your most recent experience or achievements.

Make it as brief as possible

You wouldn’t want your resume to be 10 pages long, 2–3 pages are enough and each section should be as short as possible including only the most key and relevant information so that the employer is able to consume more information about you, and more quickly understand your fitness for the role.

Extract it in relevant file extensions

Sometimes recruiters get candidates’ resumes in an image file and reading it is not fun. CV parsers usually cannot extract any data from image files so you need to think about extracting your resume in the right file extension — .pdf, .doc, or .docx are perfect.

Naming your file is important too, so don’t name it just as a resume or profile, put your name in the file name (e.g. CatherineScott.pdf).

Make it relevant

When putting working experience use relevant job titles, you don’t want to seem like you’ve made up your experience. If possible put job description or summary — that will clarify what were your responsibilities and what kind of skills do you have.

We hope that these tips will help you create and update your resume because all of these little things matter when applying for a job. Recruiters see hundreds of resumes daily so make sure that yours is standing out.

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