3 simple steps to create an effective resume

It has been always fun and challenging to create a better resume which eventually gets short-listed by good companies. Actually resume is very important and it plays almost 25% of your new career opportunity. There are plenty of sources available online to help us create — but it actually overwhelmed!

So, I wanted to share my experience which could help to write and format a decent resume.

Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash

Key takeaways

• Make it short — provide only highlights rather than giving boring stories
• Showcase your skills, achievements, portfolios, social linking, public contributions, and value adds
• Prepare resume towards the job description and the requirement

Steps

#1: Gather your personal details

1. Full Name
2. Designation (good if that is relevant to the job description)
3. Email (Try to provide an easy email that you can pronounce/ spell easily)
4. Phone (with country code and area code split)
5. LinkedIn public URL (Try to edit your URL to match your name in LinkedIn)
6. Github URL (avoid if you don't have much activity)
7. Stackoverflow (avoid if you don’t have much activity)
8. Social blog URLs like medium (provide only relevant)
9. Portfolio websites (if you have any)

Resume-Sample Personal Details (on the header)

#2: Draft the crisp content from your work experience

• Start from your current or most recent work
• First, list your role (For example, Senior Frontend Engineer)
• Second, mention your company with location — preferably city, state (For example, ABC Inc., San Francisco, CA)
• Third, provide your exact duration — preferably month, year (For example, Jan 2015 — Dec 2020)
• Most importantly, jot down your roles and responsibilities, value adds of every job/ project. If you have lesser companies, split projects wise else split company wise. If you are working as a contractor mention your client name and keep your company name in the bracket. Start each point with action words like Improved, Optimized, Created, Developed, Designed, Implemented, Negotiated, Managed. List metrics and examples. Use benchmarked data to compare your result after your work. Include the programming languages used for that work. This might be clear with the below example:

Optimized the page rendering time from 4.5 seconds (poor) to 2 seconds (good) by following the largest contentful paint (LCP) standards which helped increase the new users visit to 20%

Reference: https://web.dev/lcp/

#3: Organize, Format, and complete

Organize your content

• Keep your personal details (Step #1) on top
• Show your technical skills next — preferably on the left or right layout
• If skills placed on the left or right column, keep the “Achievements/ Awards” section underneath
• Then keep the “Certification/ Training” if you have any
• Finally, keep the education details
• On the main column (left or right based on what you chose for skills) start with your “Experience” section. If you are a fresher start with your academic or pet projects

Format

Here comes the funny part. I have faced a lot of painful and crazy experience when dealing with formating resumes in Microsoft Word. But I will some useful tips:

1. Create a table layout like below instead of using a column layout
2. Write your major sections like below

3. After filled with all the contents remove the border and draw the bottom border with the desired style for the header and the left/right column

4. Colors and fonts — try to choose the minimum number of professional and web-safe colors and fonts. I preferred to choose one unique font across the resume and 3 colors (black, gray, blue). Use different font sizes where ever required. But keep it consistent. Web-safe font and colors are important as the email provider and the recruiter's machine might not support the special fonts. Some best fonts for resumes:

• Arial
• Cambria
• Calibri
• Didot
• Garamond
• Times New Roman
• Helvetica

Complete

Consider below DO’s and DON’Ts before completing:

DO

• limit the pages up to 2
• spell check before saving
• keep the keywords and their casing properly (For example, JavaScript is the right way. NOT Javascript)
• export/ save as your .doc format into .pdf (compatible format to share in email and multiple platforms like mobile)

DON’T

• include passport or visa numbers or any secured information
• use multiple bullet point styles
• mention any reference or referral
• mention legacy technologies like jQuery, AJAX, JSON
• mention the responsibilities like coding, bug fixing, documenting as it is so obvious