A professional resume is a document for the transition from education life to professional life. It includes education, experiences, technical skills, and all the relevant skills for the job application in an easy-to-read, understandable language and format.
To communicate effectively with the recruiter, candidates need to make an appealing resume; to do so, you need to know how to create a professional resume to score better than competitors.
Let’s go through the process of making a professional resume for a stunning first impression.
Resume Style
There should be the proper order of information for a professional-looking resume. Resume formatting styles speak a lot about your work experience and how you want to explore new options or growth in your existing career.
Three Types of Resume Formats
Combination Option
This format is good for people with relevant working experience. It is suitable where skills and experience are equally vital. Both columns should have equal weightage in the resume.
Functional Option
If you have changed jobs frequently or took a break from the workplace for some important reason, try a functional format for resume making. Reasons for the gap might be the educational purpose, personal circumstances, break from monotonous work life or any other relevant purpose.
You can give any reason but should be prepared to justify the gap during the interview because the interviewer will ask you why the gap is for sure.
Chronological Option
Chronological format is for those who have impeccable professional experience without any gaps or frequent changes. Here professional experience comes in the first column and details about projects and key job responsibilities at companies.
Contact Details
Write your name clearly and in bold on the top of the resume. The name should be full and readable, not more than a font size of fourteen. Contact information should include full name, mobile number (Preferably active on WhatsApp) and Email address.
If you are applying for creative profiles such as digital marketing, graphic designer, etc., attach a video resume or work samples link.
Objective or Summary
After the contact column, add a resume summary if you have good years of relevant professional experience or an Objective column if you don’t have experience. In the objective column, you can mention the goals and objectives of the career, whereas you can mention snaps of previous work and responsibility in summary.
A summary is a sneak peek view of the entire resume for HR and mentions the most relevant skills, work, and achievement at previous workplaces in short and concise sentences.
Skill column
Add a column of skills that are relevant as per the job requirements. Write relevant skills for hard and soft skill categories.
Mention skills that you can use at work, during transfer and changing career and before finalizing your resume, review the job description to confirm the relevancy of your skills.
Experience Section
Add the most recent and relevant work experience on the top of this column and then continue with other companies consecutively. Here you need to use the reverse-chronological format of resume writing.
Things to include about your experience in a company
- Time-period including starting and end date
- Key Performance Indicators at the company
- Major achievements such as projects handling of big-pocket clients, awards etc.
- Training on job and certification
Some of the points to make the career section impressive for recruiters
- Write achievements in numerical. Employers find such candidates more confident about their performance, and it helps measure their direct value addition for the company.
- Use keywords for job description in achievements at the job. For example- if a company wants a candidate who can meet sales targets. You can mention that you have achieved sales targets for previous employees.
- Mention key points exactly as per job requirements. Keep it short and relevant, don’t describe the complete job role. You can use bullets to increase visibility.
- To make the resume attractive and appealing, use an active voice in sentences.
- You can also include volunteer experience, internships if you don’t have much experience.
Educational Qualification
Education column becomes more important if you don’t have much experience or changing your career or industry. Education qualification includes the name of the college or institute, year on admission and pass-out, degree, division and marks.
Some other points should also include in the section to make the education column effective:
- Grade point average
- Coursework
- Participation in college events
- Managing events in institutes
- Awards and rewards
Add additional columns
Freshers and persons who are changing careers do not have much to write in their resume. To cover up blank space, add an interest or hobbies column.
But hobbies and interests should be as per the job description and relevant to the company.
Resume Format
Layout, Content and Format, all three are important to know how to create a professional resume. The format is very important to give a presentable look for the resume. There are certain standard rules for resumes and should follow them while making a resume.
Some of the standard tips for format the resume:
- Keep font between 10 to 12.
- Use Ariel or Helvetica font for readable and clean font style.
- The margin between 1 to 1.5 inches
- Name and Column Headers should be in bold and bigger font size than other content
- In sections such as education and career, use bullets to highlight important points in a short and concise manner.
This is how to create a professional resume, following the steps mentioned above.
Conclusion
Create a professional resume as per the specific requirements of the job. Keep it short and effective. A one-page resume is sufficient for freshers, and you can write two pages if you have good years of experience.
Before finalizing, review the whole document, check for any grammatical mistakes, misspelling. Ask for a third-party review, preferably from a professor, friends, family members, for honest feedback.
