What Does a Good Resume Look Like? And How to Make One Now!
This post shows you what a good resume should look like; the features it should have to make it good enough to be picked by prospective employers among hundreds of others; and how to make one for your job hunting success.
It also provides direction to lots of resume examples that you can use as templates when making your own.
Now, let’s get started by first looking at what a resume is:
A resume is a document employers would usually want to see to tell them whether an applicant is qualified and suitable for the job they have available or not.
It contains information about the job seeker’s experience, skills, and educational training that makes them perfect for the job.
A good resume is an important document you will need to have if you are looking for a job, as it can affect your been invited to an interview or not.
A well written resume can give you an appointment to an interview where you will be able to prove to the employer why they should hire you.
But a bad or ineffective resume will easily get lost among hundreds of others from other applicants and you will never have the opportunity to discuss how valuable you would be to employers even if you were actually the best person for the job.
That’s how important it is for you to have a good resume if you desire to improve your chances of getting a job in the competitive job market.
You can write a resume for yourself or work with a professional writer to do it for you. Whichever way you choose to prepare your resume, you should give it the very best of attention.
If you would like to learn how to write a good resume so you can do it by yourself, the tips we provide here and the sample resumes on this website will help you to achieve it.
Now, let’s see what a good resume must have:
As someone seeking a job, you must see a resume as a marketing tool, which should get the prospective employer to give you an interview appointment.
Here are three things that make a resume so good that it gets the employer’s attention, which you should imbibe in writing yours:
The resume should be so compelling that anyone who reads it will like to have a chat with you. The statements in the resume should be carefully crafted to highlight your expertise, skills, and experience for the job.
Your resume must get the attention of the person reading it as soon as they start reading it, else, they will lose interest reading it and dump it.
Employers don’t usually spend much time on a resume except the one that catches their attention.
Research shows that employers spend an average of ten seconds on each resume submitted to them, except those that appeal to them, which they spend more time reading.
This means that for your resume to get read, it must capture the attention of the reader as quickly as possible.
When hiring, companies look for people who would bring solution or value to what they do. They don’t employ people for the sake of providing employment, rather, they look for people to help them solve a problem, or to reach a goal.
So, they search for people with the right skills, experience, and attitude for what they want to achieve.
Therefore, for your resume to gain the attention of employers, it must show that you understand exactly the solution the employer is expecting you to bring to the table, and that you have the capability to be effective on the job.
This is why resumes made specifically for an employer are more effective than those for general purpose.
To write a resume for a position in a known company, you will have to do some research about the company to know the areas they are concerned about with regard to the position.
Sometimes, the job description of the available position that goes with the vacancy advertisement can be a source of information about what’s important to the employer that they want to hire people for.
Knowing this will help you to address those concerns by highlighting in your resume those skills, experience, and training that will enable you to efficiently fix them.
A good resume is one that is properly organized to immediately catch employers’ attention. To achieve this, the entire document should be broken up into few sections, with each section providing the relevant information to help employers properly assess your suitability for the job.
For the fact that employers receive lots of applications and resumes from job seekers when a vacant position is advertised, they will usually spend a few minutes on a resume.
Using a resume format with few sections that present the best information that the employer is looking for to convince them that you are the best person for the job will do a better job of getting you an appointment for interview.
Such resumes will get the attention of the reader faster and keep them reading to the end, than presenting a resume with large and irrelevant content that only bores the reader.
We have observed that the resume format with four sections, namely: objective statement, core competence, work experience, and educational qualification work great in conveying job seekers’ suitability for a job to employers.
Now, let’s see how to create these sections when writing a resume for any position:
As it has been said earlier, a good resume is one that makes a great impact on employers, impressing it on them that you are the right person for the job for them to want to discuss further with you in an interview.
Simply put, a great resume is one that can give you an interview appointment where you will have the opportunity to prove your worth.
So, how do you write a great resume?
To have a high impact resume, each of the sections must be well produced to clearly communicate your competence, experience, and other attributes that are important to being able to excel on the job.
Let’s look at how to write these sections:
Objective Statement
The objective should not just be to state the job title like in some resumes out there. That will not make any impact on the employer as they already know the position they are hiring for.
Your objective statement should seek to sell your competence and your ability to be highly effective on the job.
It presents an opportunity to win the heart of the employer right from the beginning of the resume by letting them know that you understand their major needs as the person they are looking for, and then present your core competence that will enable you to effectively meet those needs.
If you get your objective statement right, you can be sure that the employer will continue reading the resume and will like to chat with you in an interview, but if not done well, you could lose the reader’s attention right here.
Now, let’s take an example of both a bad objective statement, which you should avoid writing and the good one that you should copy.
Let’s suppose you are writing a resume for the post of a babysitter (you can actually see a sample babysitter resume here):
The bad objective statement that some people write is something like:
“Seeking the position of a babysitter.”
Like we said earlier, this kind of objective statement is not good enough to capture employers’ attention.
To write a better statement read through the employer’s advert content for the position or the babysitter job description provided.
You will be able to find the major area for which the employer needs a babysitter, and then you can match your skills, experience, and other relevant attributes to meeting the needs.
This will surely get the employer’s attention and they will want to discuss the prospect of you working with them further with you.
So, here is a better objective statement you can produce:
“Seeking to work as babysitter where my exceptional ability to multitask, communicate, and work with children to the satisfaction of their parents will be fully employed.”
See more examples of objective statements from sample resumes on this website.
The next section to write is the competence section that shows employers that you have what it takes to get the job done effectively.
The Core Competence Section
Coming next to your objective statement is the core competence section where you need to sustain your reader’s interest in reading your resume by showing them the skills and other qualities you have that will enable you to be efficient and effective on the job if employed.
You will need to take a look at the job description the employer published for the position to know the competence they are looking for.
Where they did not publish the job’s competence, you can search for it online to have an idea of what’s important to employers.
We have lots of job description templates, containing skills and attributes for various occupations on this website that you can use in making your resume, and ensure that your core competence section has information that tallies with what the employer is interested in for the advertised role.
For example, the core competence part of a babysitter resume can read:
Again, you can find more examples of the core competence section, and learn how to make one for your resume, from the various resume templates we have on this website.
The Professional Qualification Section
The part of a resume that usually comes last is the professional qualification section, which provides information about the applicant’s educational background, including continuing educational programs, special training programs, and certifications they’ve had, which make them qualified to work in the position they are applying for.
So, make sure to state all relevant professional qualifications that you have completed that make you suitable for the job.
Conclusion:
This post has shown you what a good resume looks like and how you can actually write one for yourself and stand a great chance of being called to an interview.
Remember that your resume is a sales tool that should convince employers that you are the best person for the job and so give you the opportunity of an interview where you can complete the sales process and get the job.
Therefore, you need to give writing your resume a great deal of attention so that you can come up with one that will make a strong impact on employers.