It’s easy to create a resume when you’re a new grad. A couple of courses here, a few internships there, season it with that temp position at a multinational and your resume is golden. But it is much more challenging, and the stakes are higher if you’ve had five or 10 years of experience that you need to cram in less than two pages. Business Today brings you expert tips on how to write a resume if you’ve had more than five years of experience and are looking to climb that all-important corporate ladder.


Resume writing 101
Any mistake on your resume is bad news for your future employment. So be careful when you put your resume together because you don’t want to lose your potential employer’s attention before you get to meet them.

Emails are a must in today’s world, so make sure you’ve got a professional email address. Stay away from anything including the words, “cutie, sweet cherry, babe, stud, cool, gangster” — basically anything you once scribbled down on your high school notebook. If your email is still hotstuff85@yahoo.com, change it to something with just your name and initials. And no nicknames. (Yes Gigi and Mickey, that means you.)

Also, do not include your photo (although some European countries disagree.) Unless you’re planning on switching careers from banking to modeling, your employer doesn’t care what you look like. If he likes your resume, he can hold his horses until he sees you. (No one is dying to see what color your eyes are.)

Proofread your work. Trust a writer on this one — you will always find a few silly mistakes or typos the first time around. Check for typos, grammar and consistency in formatting and always use a formal font, preferably Times New Roman.

If you haven’t written a resume in a long time, refer to any number of professional online resources to find more basic resume dos and don’ts.


Length
We don’t care if you’ve had the richest, most interesting of careers — employers get dozens of resumes, if not more, everyday. Unless you’re a Kennedy, human resources are probably not interested in reading your biography. Always keep your resume to one or two pages at the most. If you know your strengths and the highlights of your career, it will be easy to cut it down to the right length without omitting anything important.

Maha Fakhry, associate director of the Career Advancement and Placement Services (CAPS) at the American University in Cairo, says general managers and managing directors write 1–2 page resumes. If they can do it, there’s no reason you can’t.


“Things that aren’t hallmarks in your career shouldn’t be there.”


Exclude
To keep your resume short and sweet, you need to do some serious editing. An employer is unlikely to care about where you have traveled before, if you have over five years of experience.

So exclude hobbies and travel, unless they are relevant to the position. They help employers learn about your personality, but five years into your career, your track record is what speaks to your skills, not what sport you played growing up. Again, this isn’t a one-formula-fits-all tip, since certain positions will require you to show your hobbies, but most professions allow you to skip this bit.

Unless your GPA was high, exclude it alongside your extra-curricular activities or abridged transcript. Your academic record isn’t as relevant after years in the workforce. For example, if you were working in the stock market, don’t include that you participated in a stock market simulation seminar back in university.

“Things that aren’t hallmarks in your career shouldn’t be there,” says Fakhry. So unless you won a stock market simulation or were head of the student union, your employer doesn’t want to know how you spent your free time at university. (However, do include any relevant training or certifications you’ve received or courses you’ve taken since you’ve graduated that are directly relevant to your profession to show you have participated in professional development.)

Also, exclude the objectives heading in your resume. If you’re a fresh grad, it makes sense to explicitly say what your objectives are. But as your career evolves, it becomes redundant. You don’t need to state that you’re looking for a job in marketing if you’ve already been working in marketing for six years.


Include
Instead, include a list of qualifications at the top of your resume. “This would add some sense of maturity to the resume and show how seasoned this professional is,” says Fakhry. “Unless you are really applying for something very specific then you would put a summary of qualifications.”

But remember to list your achievements versus bland job descriptions. Employers want to see what you achieved on the job and not what you were supposed to be doing. Fakhry explains that the job description doesn’t serve the applicant in showing how good they are.

“What serves them well is to show what they have achieved from this job, quantifiably,” she says. “So for example give numbers if you are in sales, give the sales volume you have sold.” The key, Fakhry adds, is in putting in as many numbers as you can to quantify your achievements on the job, without overdoing it.

“What serves them well is to show what they have achieved from this job,
quantifiably.”


Choose the right resume
There are three popular resume formats: chronological, functional and a mixture of the two. The most commonly used is the chronological resume format. This is the resume that lists all positions held in reverse chronological order and works well for people with experience in their field because it highlights the most recent experience first and then shows how your career has developed.

For someone with gaps in their career (if you have taken a few years off, for instance), has worked in various fields or is looking to switch careers, a functional resume is probably most suitable. “Employers want to see the track record,” says Fakhry adding that, in the above cases, functional resumes serve applicants better.

Functional resumes focus on skills, achievements and qualifications rather than positions filled. So if the applicant has held many leading positions in different fields, then he could organize his resume by leadership skills, business development skills and organizational development, for instance, says Fakhry. The focus of the resume would be those areas, with the employment history briefly mentioned at the bottom (just the titles, durations and companies’ names without description).

Fakhry points out that each case is different and there is no single success formula for resume writing. This is why she thinks it is crucial to get a second opinion on your resume. This could be a professional opinion from recruitment agencies and career services both online and otherwise. It could also be a mentor’s opinion or someone in your peer group.

Although CAPS offers those services for alumni — including writing and advice for executive and managerial resumes for free, they do not offer this service for the general public.
Look for next issue’s follow-up article on how to get recruited in your mid-20s and 30s. bt