A Professional Resume is a very important tool today to market yourselves effectively such that you get a job:
- That you’d love to do,
- Is perfectly suited to your skills and abilities, and,
- The pay is more than what you’d expected. (Of course, salary expectations are in general, always more than what you get, but that’s a different issue altogether.)
Ideal Length:
Having said that, let’s focus on the ideal length a successful functional resume format should have. Let’s keep in mind that the length of a fresher/intern/graduate resume will not be the same as that of an experienced candidate. A college student resume (entry-level resume) should have at least 2 pages, while a resume of a professional or an experienced person should have between 2 to 5 pages depending upon his/her work experience. The more the experience, the more space it should occupy on a resume.
Work Experience:
Here, we need to be careful to only include the work experience that is related to the career field that you are applying for. If for example, you are applying for a teaching position, then an ideal teachers resume should not contain work experience related to sales or marketing for that matter. Hope you get what I mean. However, if you’ve had no or very little experience as a teacher, then add the non-related experience by all means, but be careful to keep it short without elaborating on it.
A recruiter or headhunter scans a resume from the thousands that he/she receives for 12 to 25 seconds before deciding whether to keep it in, or, send it to the bin. Thus a Microsoft word resume template that you will send via mail (or upload to a career form on a company website) to recruiters and companies needs to be created in the correct manner.
DO NOT write line after line in your resume, from top to bottom, without hitting the enter button twice. A page on the screen that looks jam-packed with sentences, will not do. The reader will get bored and click delete. To avoid that, break up your page into distinct sections with headings and separate each section with white spaces. Paragraphs consisting of 3 – 4 sentences is ideal. Use Lots of white spaces between paragraphs (Like the way this page is written.)
Ideal Fonts:
Scanning a resume on paper is again very different as compared to scanning a resume online. The font types and sizes should therefore be different as compared to the ones used when printing on paper. Some of the ideal font types and its corresponding sizes to use, so as to make a great impact on the recruiter are:
- Arial Narrow with size 11 for text, and size 13 for headings.
- Century Gothic with size 9.5 for text, and size 11 for headings.
- Verdana with size 9 for text, and size 10 or 11 for headings. » Read more: How To Do A Resume – Tips That Get Results – Interview Calls
