Dear Bev: What Are Your Top 10 Resume Do’s and Don’ts?
Job opportunities in the media business are looking up. The Internet is booming, the TV upfront is on fire, and the slump seems to be over for magazines, radio and local TV. If you’ve been thinking about a job change, this is a great time to start searching. But while you may be ready, is your resume?
Here are my top 10 resume do’s and don’ts.
1. DO focus on accomplishments and achievements, not just job responsibilities.
2. DO include numbers and brand names. Specifics always catch a reader’s eye faster than general statements.
3. DON’T just add on to an old resume. Edit your previous positions. A job you had 10 years ago shouldn’t command the same amount of space as your current role.
4. DO check out resume formats. There are lots of examples online, including at career sites, that show you how to format in order to highlight important key words.
5. DO make sure your resume is easy to read. There should be ample white space, bolding where applicable and bullet points.
6. DON’T go past two pages. And if you’re more junior, keep it to one.
7. DO indicate the total number of years you’ve been at a company — even if you’ve had several jobs there. One way to handle this is to list dates in parentheses beside each different title/role at the same company. The full employment time should be listed adjacent to the company name.
8. DON’T sacrifice appearance and readability by cramming in too much information. Consider editing down information rather than opening the margins. This is especially true when it comes to early job experience.
9. DON’T list “References provided upon request.” Everyone knows that already.
10. DO list any additional training and interesting or offbeat extracurricular activities or hobbies. While you may not want to list a regular Friday night poker game, you do want to note you ran and completed a 10k race.
Dear Bev: What Are Your Top 10 Resume Do’s and Don’ts?
Job opportunities in the media business are looking up. The Internet is booming, the TV upfront is on fire, and the slump seems to be over for magazines, radio and local TV. If you’ve been thinking about a job change, this is a great time to start searching. But while you may be ready, is your resume?
Here are my top 10 resume do’s and don’ts.
1. DO focus on accomplishments and achievements, not just job responsibilities.
2. DO include numbers and brand names. Specifics always catch a reader’s eye faster than general statements.
3. DON’T just add on to an old resume. Edit your previous positions. A job you had 10 years ago shouldn’t command the same amount of space as your current role.
4. DO check out resume formats. There are lots of examples online, including at career sites, that show you how to format in order to highlight important key words.
5. DO make sure your resume is easy to read. There should be ample white space, bolding where applicable and bullet points.
6. DON’T go past two pages. And if you’re more junior, keep it to one.
7. DO indicate the total number of years you’ve been at a company — even if you’ve had several jobs there. One way to handle this is to list dates in parentheses beside each different title/role at the same company. The full employment time should be listed adjacent to the company name.
8. DON’T sacrifice appearance and readability by cramming in too much information. Consider editing down information rather than opening the margins. This is especially true when it comes to early job experience.
9. DON’T list “References provided upon request.” Everyone knows that already.
10. DO list any additional training and interesting or offbeat extracurricular activities or hobbies. While you may not want to list a regular Friday night poker game, you do want to note you ran and completed a 10k race.
Check out this interesting book review by John Horgan on Nicholas Carr’s latest book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
Try not to check your email before you get to the end of this sentence. See? That wasn’t so bad.
“While toiling over what you are now reading, I scanned my three email accounts dozens of times and wrote a handful of emails; I responded on my cellphone to a score of text messages from my girlfriend and kids; I checked the balance of my bank account to see if a promised payment had arrived . . . and so on.
Yet I’m relatively unwired. I don’t do Twitter, Facebook or Skype. And I did all this digital darting hither and thither even though I found the subject I was supposed to be writing about—Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”—quite absorbing. And disturbing. We all joke about how the Internet is turning us, and especially our kids, into fast-twitch airheads incapable of profound cogitation. It’s no joke, Mr. Carr insists, and he has me persuaded.”
Check out the neat video below of an art installation created by Christopher Baker and Juhasz Marton Andras (and blogged by Austin based group Public School.)
Here’s the idea behind the installation:
“The Murmur Study by Christopher Baker and Juhász Márton András constantly searches Twitter for phrases like eww, argh, hmph and grrr and then prints the guilty tweets on one of 30 thermal printers. The endless ticker tape gathers on the floor below. The purpose of the installation is to analyze the prevalence of human emotion through technological sources such as Facebook and Twitter.”
THE British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.
