Brunarski S Resume-Building Tips

Brunarski’s Resume-Building Tips

Use a standard font (i.e, Arial, Time New Roman) and stick with one font for the entire resume. You may bold, italicize, underline or change the size of the font – just don’t vary the font itself. I strongly recommend that you not use a font less than about 10.5 in size.

Name & Address: MS Word automatically underlines email addresses and prints them in blue font. To undo this, highlight the email address and click the U icon. Highlight the email address again, and change the font color manually to black. (The same goes for email addresses included in cover letters.) You may wish to include an email address other than your MU address in case the MU email server is down, or in case you will be on the job market subsequent to your senior year. Make sure that recruiters can reach you during vacations or breaks in the school year. Choose a professional sounding email address for your alternative email, such as your first and last name. Employers will be apprehensive to hire someone that they must contact using [email protected].

Objective: Unless your job focus is narrow, prepare a more general objective for resumes that will be viewed by employers in many different fields, such as the resume that you will file in the resume book of the “MU finance club”. However, if you are applying for a particular position, make the resume objective somewhat more focused. I.e., if you are applying for a position as a loan officer of a bank, you may wish to start your objective statement with I am seeking a career in banking….. You might also bring several different versions of your resume with different objectives to career fairs. Many how-to books on resume preparation offer useful examples of well-written objective statements that you can easily tailor to suit your needs. When I read an exceptionally well-worded objective, I often discover that it originated from a book of resume examples.

Education: This follows the objective statement. Do not list your high school. List your expected degree. You may wish to list your business GPA or your major-field GPA in addition to your overall GPA – especially if the latter are higher than your overall GPA. I recommend listing your GPA if it is over 3.0. “Thematic sequence” is a term specific to MU. In other words, most recruiters will not know what this is. You may wish to list a thematic sequence on your resume as a “secondary field” or “secondary concentration”.

List your expected graduation date. Rather than listing 2009, you might list the degree date as “expected May, 2009”. I recommend you right-align all of your dates (including those for work experience, and activities.)

If you have attended more than one college, list the most recent one first.

List that you attend the “Farmer School of Business.” Named business schools are more prestigious.

Work Experience: This section follows education. Starting with the most recent employers, list the company you work(ed) for, and its location (city, state). List your position with the firm. I recommend using bullet points to list your job responsibilities. Your job responsibility descriptions should start with “action” verbs – many of which have an “ed” ending, i.e, “prepared financial statements…, organized presentations… etc. These need not be complete sentences – but you should end each with a period. You may wish to indent these for clarity. Keep in mind that potential employers must be able to understand these responsibilities, so you should not use jargon, acronyms or terms known only within that firm. It might help to have someone else read the description of your job responsibilities to see if they fully understand them. You need not have the same number of responsibilities listed for each job. When deciding what to list, consider experiences that a recruiter would consider most relevant to your future employment.

You can use bold font, underlining and/or italics to differentiate in this section of the resume. (I.e, you may choose to list the company in bold, your position in italics, and use indented bullet points and regular font to list your responsibilities.) . It may also help to right-justify dates of employment as well as other dates listed on the resume, as this saves a line of spacing and makes the chronology of the resume easy to view at a glance.

Many people choose to list co-op or internship positions under “work experience”, rather than listing them as a separate category, even if they are voluntary positions. You need not specifically state that the position is/was unpaid. You can note “co-op or internship” in your job description if you choose.

If your resume is too long, you may choose to omit some of your work experience. Candidates for omission include less relevant work experiences for your future position (i.e., babysitting, lawn mowing) or work experience dating back to high school.

Activities and Interests Again, list these starting with the most recent, first. If trying to shorten your resume, the focus for these activities should be on those that demonstrate leadership, discipline & competition, or membership in professional organizations. The “MU Economics Club” is of more interest to employers than the fact that you enjoy hiking and swimming. Any participation in competitive collegiate athletics (MU football team, MU swim team etc) should be included. I would recommend listing “intermurals” only if you have available space or need something to list in this area. Any specific experiences with respect to listed activities can again be listed using bullet points.

Be careful that your resume does not to give the impression that one activity or interest dominates your life – be it Greek, political or religious. It’s OK to list these interest/activities, but they should not occupy more space on your resume than your education and work experience, combined. If you do much volunteer or charity work as part of a Greek organization, you may wish to omit the affiliation on some of them - (I.e., list “Habitat for Humanity,” not “Alpha Delta Epsilon Habitat for Humanity”).

Honors & Awards List only collegiate honors & awards – not honors and awards from high school.

Special Skills I recommend against listing skills that are assumed of every business graduate (I.e, email, MS Word, Excel). On the other hand, if you have special skills (i.e, you can program in C++, you have knowledge of UNIX operating systems) you can list these skills. Be sure to list any foreign language skills.

Other tips:

Buy some resume paper rather that using standard typing paper. Make sure that your answering machine is programmed to provide a relatively normal message.

Print your resume on a printer that provides sharp lettering (no blurred or fuzzy print). If your ink jet is four years old and a bit worse for the wear, use a university laser-jet printer or have your resume professionally duplicated.

If you intend to send your resume via email attachment, send it in pdf format (Adobe Acrobat). MS Word documents can be re-formatted to conform to the printer of the recipient of your email. This can result in document spacing that appears very different than the document spacing when viewed on your computer.

Hold your resume at a distance and blur your vision. If you have much more white space on one side of the resume and the text seems off-center on the page, I recommend you re-arrange the text so that it is more centered.