Honest thoughts about resumes

A resume is not an essay about an individual's life, but a document that should qualitatively and succinctly highlight the most important career achievements, chronologically present recent work experience, and draw attention to the individual's skills and education.

A resume should not be understood as a piece of paper that tolerates information from first loves to night outs, married life, number of children, and alimony payments.

On the contrary, the goal is to present yourself to the recruiter or potential employer in the best possible light and achieve that, in the few seconds that the screening lasts, a mark is left in the reader's memory. A clue that can lead you to your future workplace.

The above examples of information about the number of children and alimony are not made up. They are real and included in the resumes of candidates who have passed through the databases available to us. 

I will add nationality, gender, religious and political beliefs to the category of unnecessary information as some of the most common ones.

What does a resume include?

Speaking about work experience, it should be remembered that the greatest focus should be on a recent career. What you have done for the last five to ten years is the most important for you as a potential candidate and that is what we are most interested in! 

Concentrate on presenting your last two or three jobs in detail, and summarize the rest under the "Early Career" category.

It is enough to state the name of the employer and the position and be sure to emphasize that it is a student job, paid internship, volunteering, or other.

Be careful when describing your recent work experience in detail. With emphasis on the word "detailed". Indicate (in bold letters, separate in a separate line) the name of the employer and the industry, your workplace, and highlight the most important work tasks in three to four entries. 

Do not copy job descriptions from systematizations and work regulations. 

Rather use the so-called CAR method.

CAR method for writing resumes

The CAR method is an acronym for Challenge, Action, Result. 

In practice, it looks like this, if you work in sales, for example, you will write that you have "expanded the business network", which is a challenge that the employer has put before you, in such a way that you have taken certain actions, through direct contact with parties via emails and calls, which resulted in an increase in the number of clients by 10% on an annual basis as a final result.

In this way, you specify very clearly what you did, and what you did to reach the goal, and you will quantify and qualify your achievements. 

Even if you cannot reduce your results to numbers, you can certainly single out the final achievement, such as "increased user satisfaction", "better brand visibility", or "higher employer branding".

In the section where you will refer to your education, we advise you to highlight the highest title, whether you have a secondary, higher, or higher education.

So, if you've graduated from college, use the "space" to write which majors or the most important courses you took in your undergraduate and graduate studies, or what was the topic of your final thesis.

Information about your high school, and especially your completed elementary school, is not necessary. You had to finish that part of your education to enter college, so it goes without saying.

If you attended courses, seminars, education, training - great! Select the most important, the freshest. 

The Coursera course you completed 10 years ago probably doesn't even exist anymore. Or the workshop on how to use Word that your employer sent you to in an era when knowledge of the Office package was not considered as necessary as finishing elementary school.

How to describe skills in the resume?

After all, skills are what make you competitive. But, be honest, especially in the self-assessment of foreign language knowledge. Often (too often!) candidates state that their knowledge of the English language is at the C1/C2 level.

This is the level of native speakers, people who were educated in an Anglo-Saxon speaking area or those who have been using English for years on a daily basis, in business and private environments.

Put yourself in a situation where you have to talk to a client or colleague for 10 minutes in English or practice it at home. If you need both hands and feet to communicate in eight out of ten minutes, your English is not at the C1/C2 level. The same instructions are applicable for other skills, select what you are best at, and what you can do in the middle of the night with your eyes closed.

If it's photo editing in Photoshop, great. If it's pivot tables, another foreign language, or programming, it goes in the resume! Skip the rest.

Finally, it is a misconception that you must and may only have one resume. It is not a mistake to make several versions, i.e. to have a concise and extensive version, and to additionally adjust the resume depending on who you are sending it to, visually and in terms of content. 

The point of everything is that your CV must be clear, reviewed, and concise. It must stand out from the crowd, in a positive, not a negative sense.