The golden Do’s and Don’ts of writing a resume

Written by: Chane da Costa 

As an active job seeker marketing your personal brand correctly to the potential employer is an important aspect in landing your dream job.  A resume is your opportunity to make a good first impression and differentiate yourself from other candidates in the running for the position. You could have a great resume, but tiny errors could potentially land your resume in the bin. It is not all about your qualifications, experience and correct structure of your resume, what your resume looks like represents certain characteristics and personality traits that you may have.

Your resume is a tool to move you from application to interview, it speaks your first words to your potential employers so rather put in that extra bit of effort and ensure it is perfect, rather than rushing it and you cost yourself your dream job. The golden do and don’t guidelines for every resume might seem logical but you will be surprised how many candidates have these errors on their resume and what tiny errors you have missed.

The Golden Do’s

The following Golden Do’s will ensure that the most obvious and obscured details of your resume exhibits you as the perfect candidate. Do:  

1.  Be honest and truthful, in this modern age it has become easier for potential employers to attain information about you.
2. Customise your resume and closely as possible to the job description that you are applying for.
3. Ensure that your resume is updated regularly, you do not want to miss out on providing information that your most recent opportunities have provided. This will also help in ensuring that you do not forget about these details.
4. Use spell check, often potential employers discard resumes because there are silly spelling errors. These errors often represent your carelessness or that you lack attention to detail.
5. Ask a person experience in formulating their resume, to proof read your resume for any mistakes.
6. Make use of reverse chronological order. Start from the most recent qualifications or employment history down.
7. Always ask your selected references for permission to list their contact details in your resume.
8. List your job title, duties and reason for leaving with your employment history. Candidates often only list the company they worked and the duration period they worked at the company for.
9. Use the correct formatting; it is easiest to formulate your resume in Microsoft Word. You can also PDF your resume to ensure everything stays in place.

The Golden Don’ts

The following Golden Don’ts are critical to check before finalising your resume and applying to your potential dream job. Don’t:

1. Repeat the same information already mentioned once in your resume.
2. Write excessive detailed sentences, a resume should be a summary not a story.
3. Stress about the length of your resume, if you are short and concise with all the relevant information and your resume exceeds the narrated two pages, it is ok.
4. Be tempted to shrink the font or reduce the margin size to fit all your information in. Stick to one font type, Headings 14pt and normal text 12pt.
5. Use various colours and graphic, your resume should look professional and not like a birthday invitation.
6.  Provide unusual nicknamed email addresses, try keep your resume as professional as possible.
7. Don’t lie on your resume, if you caught lying on your resume, this will affect your reputation negatively and forfeit your chances of landing the job.
8. Bad mouth current and previous employers when providing a reason for leaving the company.
9. Use social network links unless it adds professional value to your job application, although this may provide a sense of transparency it could also allow intervene with your application with regards to posts being contrary to that of potential employers opinions.