Writing a Resume: The Step-By-Step Recipe
Need to make a new resume quickly and don’t have time to waste? Follow those steps and you will be done in two hours, with a perfectly tailored resume, up to date and ready to be submitted.
What you will need
You won’t need fancy software or an artsy template if you don’t work in a creative field. And even if you do, you won’t need any until the last step. You can use any word processor like Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, or Microsoft Word if you have a license.
Being at home and having access to the Internet might be required since you will have some research to do about yourself.
I would also recommend that you find a peaceful place and make some tea, as you will have a couple of choices and memory efforts to do, and bullet-lists to read.
A word about using word processors
Here is a word processor rule that will speed up the whole process: Use the pre-formatted styles. For example, “Heading 1” for section titles, “Header 2” for job titles/company/location, “Heading 3” for dates. It won’t be pretty at first, but in the end, it will make everything way easier.
Step One: Gathering the facts
If you have valuable work experience 👩🏫
You need to list everything extensively. This can be tedious if — just like me — you don’t have an infallible memory, but you can simply follow those steps:
- Collect everything you have on your social networks: LinkedIn of course, and every other professional network, but also Facebook (in your profile, under “About”, “Work and Education”).
- Get your payslips out of the closet, and use that to list your previous jobs. Remember to write down the places and dates.
- Dig up mails, work documents, notes. List your duties, the projects you took part in, your best professional achievements, and all the relevant data about your performance.
If you have little to no work experience 🎓
Having no work experience is not as bad as it sounds. Don’t sell yourself short. There are still many good things you can write about you:
- List your internships. Even the short ones. Those are valuable and real-world work experiences.
- If you did odd jobs to support yourself, list them. Especially if you worked several times the same summer job, or had an after-class one for a long time. This will act as proof of your will and reliability.
- Listing volunteer work, work with associations, or pretty much any work you’ve helped with (like setting up things for a music festival, a local event, etc) can help you just as much as those small jobs.
- Personal projects can — given that they are related to the job — be a good way to show off, especially if you can bring something to show in an interview (if you built a website or an app, it can give you a great boost when applying to a software development job).
- If you just got out of school and did not manage to get enough content to write down with the previous things mentioned, you can still use school projects you had through relevant courses.
In both cases
- List your skills: The technical ones, the soft skills, the languages you can speak, the certifications you passed, everything. Don’t be picky now because omitting one thing can make you forget about another, more important.
- Don’t bother going too far back about your education. The last one or two diplomas you got are the only thing necessary, no one needs to know when and where you took your 9th grade. It might even do more harm than good.
- Only include your extracurricular activities if they show cross-curricular skills that apply to your work field. Do not include those that show that you will take long or frequent vacations or be unreachable, like “I traveled to a new country every six months for the last three years” if that’s not part of the job you are seeking.
- Do not include random details or anything fake for that matter. Some people tend to add hobbies like kayaking, even if they have never approached one. This will backfire. Don’t do it.
- Don’t oversell something you only enjoy. You are not a cinema expert because you know by heart the Dollars Trilogy. It can backfire during an interview. So it will, by Murphy’s Law.
Friendly reminder: Save your work 💾.
Step Two: Curate, detail, curate again
Select relevant content
By now you should have plenty of content, maybe way too much. We are going to filter that, then add more, then filter again. Here are the steps:
- If you have enough work experience, cut irrelevant odd jobs, summer jobs, etc. Avoid leaving blank periods in your work history, especially if you do not want any questions about it during interviews.
- Remove any project or number you don’t want to be asked about. If it doesn’t make you look good, or makes you feel uncomfortable, remove it.
- Choose your skills. You can do more than you want to do. Do not include technical skills that you don’t want to be part of your job if you are targeting a big company that offers a wide range of jobs (like IT companies). Otherwise, you might end-up pushed in the wrong job.
Add details
Without this unneeded content, you can now detail what is relevant:
- Under job titles, volunteer work, internships, you have to explain what it was about. The responsibilities, what you did, and what were the results of your work. In the end, there has to be some sort of correlation between your skills and the job descriptions. Add performance figures here, if there are any.
- Evaluate your skills and languages. Do not use pointless numbers or graphical scales to express them. I have seen resumes go to the trash can because of this: “Spanish 🟢🟢🟢🟢⚪”. This means nothing.
Instead, use meaningful adjectives like “fluent” for languages or “autonomous” for technical skills.
Then comes a tricky part, which is adding a resume summary. It can be as simple as pitching yourself in a single sentence or go up to five sentences including a good preview of your resume.
Many people tend to overlook this part, because it’s a real writing exercise, and can feel just weird. But when you hear that recruiters take 10 seconds to decide if a resume is worth it, it’s because if they are not convinced in 10 seconds they will not read it properly, hence the importance of a compelling resume summary.
You have to squeeze everything that makes you valuable in there. Use the keywords, showcase what makes you stand out. Mention your will, your experience, or some impressive statistic. If you can, try to include the exact words used in the job offer. Speak their language.
Most importantly: it must go straight to the point. Only include the key features of your profile.
In the event of a career change, it’s also where you prove that your off-topic resume is not one. Here you can showcase the skills you are bringing from your last career.
Filter one last time
After all this content gathering and detailing, you have to remember that your resume should fit on one page. It can be two pages long if you have at least four or five long and meaningful work experiences to detail with plenty of projects. Some rare cases of long and rewarding careers might need three pages, but those people usually do not make resumes anymore.
Before deleting half of it, take into account that you can use a two-column format for your resume, but that means different parts on the left and right sides, a section should not overlap from one column to the other, it’s not a newspaper.
If you do have to remove things, start with redundant information and details, pick projects you are proud of, remove any detail from older jobs if they are not relevant anymore compared to recent ones.
Remember to save your work 💾.
Step Three: Formatting
Congratulations, your resume is complete! Maybe hideous and unreadable, but complete. If you did what I suggested at the very beginning of the first step, it won’t take long anymore.
In this step, I will give you basic formatting and styling tips. They will come in handy whether you have creative skills or not.
The first thing is looking at the lengths of the different parts of your resume, and choose how you will split the page to organize them. Here are some popular choices:
Feel free to go to your favorite image search engine and find examples of these, or other designs to get inspired.
Getting content in the right place can be tedious in word processors. The dirty secret behind every resume template is the same, it’s borderless tables. I recommend that you open a new document (did I mention you should save you work?), and create a table that matches your desired columns.
Don’t split for every vertical section, only those where the columns are different before and after. It’s up to you to choose whether you want to merge columns or create a new table for the row that has only one column.
Once the table is done, copy and paste content from the previous file in the desired table cells, complete missing data like your contact details, and hide the table borders.
The next step is to edit headings styles. You can just change the colors/fonts/sizes of one heading on the page and then update the style from where you chose it. That way, your modifications on one occurrence will be replicated on every other one.
If you have no idea of how you should style your content, I have two recommendations:
- If you want something clear and simple, check out social media that includes resumes. See how LinkedIn, Facebook, or your favorite professional network displays them. Or check personal professional websites.
- If you want something more graphic, just go to an image search engine and type in something like “creative resume”, then “beautiful resume”, and open some images you like and get inspired. Don’t copy a design if you do not have permission to do so. That’s not cool. Nor legal.
The thing is about getting the font choice, color, sizes ratios, and spacing right. I can’t emphasize this enough. Your resume needs to be more readable than good-looking.
About font styling
- Do not use fancy fonts. You just need a clear and simple one. Maybe two if you are good at pairing them. Font weight (that means bolder text) and well-chosen color accents are way easier to use and to read most of the time.
- Be consistent, do not change it mid-document if you have no reason to. Your font-style contains information on how to read your resume, so it should not be mistreated.
About spacing
Not everyone has an eye for this one, so I’ll just show you what it means:
In the first case, the text is styled but stacked, and there is no space between items so we have a hard time reading it. In the second one, the space around job titles makes you think that for each item the title is after the date and description because it is closer to the description of the previous item that theirs. The third one got it right. Titles, dates, and descriptions stick together, but unrelated items are reasonably spaced. Apply the same logic for sections of your resume and their titles.
About background colors
- Check that there is enough contrast between your text and background. Some people don’t see colors like you do. Keep this in mind.
- Some companies are still printing resumes. In greyscale. That could make your resume impossible to read. If you use background colors on the whole document, you may even never get your resume on a desk because someone thought it was expensive to print.
Frequently Asked Questions but only the answers
- No picture if you are not into modeling or acting. Either you will not get an interview because you look like someone else who doesn’t fit the job, or you will get an interview for the wrong reasons and you don’t want that.
- Always sort from newest to oldest.
- Unless stated otherwise, send it as a PDF file. And double-check that your weird font got embedded if you used one or it won’t display properly.
- Yes, you should edit it for each job you apply. But in most cases, you can simply edit the summary to include the job offer’s keywords.
