What do you bring to a potential employer? That's what you must keep in mind as you write your resume. Ask yourself what experience or qualities you possess that would make a potential employer decide to call you in for an interview over another candidate. Use your resume to sell your strengths: provide specific examples of leadership, successful projects or ways your work significantly impacted the bottom line in your previous jobs.

Make a Huge List
Before you sit down to write (or fix) that resume, the first thing you should do is make a list of everything you have ever done or accomplished in your entire life. This means everything: every single job, award, honor, volunteer work, skill, language, hobby, wart, bad dream and witty retort. Try to make the list chronological, starting with your most recent accomplishments and working your way backward right up until you received your Quickest Passage Through The Birth Canal Award. We shall deem this list your "Fat List." Henceforth, when we speak of your Fat List, we speak of the list of your life, not the list of your daily fatty-foods intake. Take good care of this list. It is your new best friend.

Why the need for such a list? Three reasons:

1. Because you can now keep this list, add to it as you accomplish more things in your life, and pick and choose as you tailor your resume to different job positions.

2. Because it's really, really hard to remember everything off the top of your head, so this list will function as a reminder of those little details that may really impress a prospective employer.

3. Because seeing everything you've done on one list will help you remember things you've done that you can't fit on your resume, but can still bring up in an interview.

All too often, people will look at their resumes and hear a nagging voice in the back of their head telling them that something's missing. With a Fat List, you can rid yourself of such voices, or at least get them to change their messages to more interesting topics of conversation. Now don't get too detailed with this list. You don't have to write down everything you did at each job, or how much you won for a particular scholarship. Just write down the name of the event and the date when it happened.

But we understand that even writing a simple Fat List can be tough. It's a lot of information in one place. So what you should do is organize your Fat List into the following sections:

1. Education: Include where you went to school, what your GPA was, a list of classes you took, what your major/minor was. If you're still in school, your most up-to-date information is fine.

2. Employment: List all jobs you've ever had, and the dates through which you had them, including all volunteer work. If nuns made you do it, it still counts.

3. Activities: Mention all school activities in which you participated. Write them all down. If you held any leadership positions or started a group yourself, throw that in, too.

4. Honors: These are academic, athletic or community awards or scholarships. Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude and the George Jetson Scholarship of the Future would all be included here.

5. Skills: If you speak any languages (even if only at a conversational level); all of your computer knowledge, especially of complicated programs; if you know how to operate heavy machinery--all of that stuff goes into the "skills" category. This is like the potpourri category of stuff you know how to do, but about which nobody has really cared much (so far).

Tailor the Resume to the Job
Phew! By now, you've finished making your Fat List, and you're ready to tackle actually writing the resume. The first thing to do is to see what the job you're applying for is like. Every resume you send out should be tailor-made for that exact job. As convenient as it can be to just make one resume, mass-copy it and throw it from the rooftops hoping an eccentric millionaire will pick it up, effective resumes are written specifically for the person or company to whom you are sending them.

The biggest tip we can give you is this: Put your best assets as close to the top of the resume as possible. This might be your education, or if you've been out of school for a little while (two or more years), your employment history. But keep in mind that your resume will not be looked at for more than 30 seconds, and no one's going to start reading at the bottom of the page. Now, the kind of job for which you are applying may affect what your "best assets" are. So what you need to do is pick the optimal resume format.

Of course, your resume will have all of the important pieces of information that all good resumes should have: your name at the top, your contact information, and different sections that clearly label your education, work experience, skills and possibly college activities. Many resumes will mesh or separate work experience in creative ways, but as far as pure information is concerned, these are the basics. But to make sure that your resume is tailored to your prospective employer, make sure the resume format you use is the most effective one. The three most common are the chronological resume, the functional resume and the curriculum vitae. Others may call these styles by different names, but you'll recognize that each has particular strengths, depending on what you've done with your life.

Chronological Resume

This is the resume style that most students use for their first resume. It's called "chronological" because under the"employment" section, it lists your most recent experience first, and works backward to your least recent experience. Note how it puts the work experience in one big lump and works backward. Employers usually prefer this type of resume, because it's simple, easy to read and straightforward. It is never more than one page.

Functional Resume

A functional resume is common among those who have garnered a potpourri of work experience, are changing fields and want to emphasize their translatable skills. For instance, if you were interested in a job as an office manager, you might split your resume into two sections: "Management" and "Organization." Then you would list in each section accomplishments that you achieved, without necessarily specifying where these achievements took place. The point, rather, is to argue that you have the necessary skills by proving competence in key areas. After these two sections, you include a small employment-history section, which merely lists where you worked and your dates of employment.

The functional resume also works well if you have a mixed bag of work experience with a loose thread holding it all together. The functional resume will allow you to emphasize that loose thread and make your employment history look united. It's also good for when your job titles (e.g., Administrative Assistant) don't give a good indication of the things you did. If possible, keep your information within each section chronological, because people always assume that stuff at the top is the most recent anyway. It is never more than one page.

Curriculum Vitae

Also called a "C.V.," a curriculum vitae is a resume that is often used when someone is entering a teaching or science position. This resume is not only longer than one page, but can be as long as you want (10 pages, 20 pages, however long it takes). A C.V. includes all of the stuff the other resumes do, but it also lists every single publication ever received, every project worked on, every honor awarded and every bit of education earned.

So let's pretend you've researched the company to which you are sending your resume, and you've chosen to use the chronological style. Now it's time to realize that you can't keep everything. You have to decide what goes and what stays, to keep your resume down to one page. If you're trying to get a sense of proportion, devote about five to seven lines to education, list at least four previous jobs (with about three to six lines explaining each job), and about two lines to skills. So look at the job description, look at your Fat List, and mix and match. If you took courses in college that are relevant to the position, feel free to list those under your education section. But the goal is not to overwhelm the reader with information. We all have lives and could talk about them endlessly. The goal is to list the relevant information that will help get your foot into the door. This includes things that are directly related, as well as things that might not be directly related to the job position, but have applicable skills (communication, leadership, organization, bilingualism--all of the kind of stuff bosses wish they had).

In your education and employment history, you need to include certain details:

* the name of the company/school

* the dates worked/attended (start and finish)

* the city in which this took place

* for the job history, a description of what you did (you'll get more details about this in Step 3).

A last word about the "Objective" section of your resume: Theologians and personnel directors have often argued whether an objective section is necessary on a resume. The objective section is the first line of your resume, right under your name and contact information, and states what you are looking for in a job. We recommend that you have an objective on your resume. Yes, it takes up space, but it also makes it look like you have direction and know what you are looking for in a job, and that you took the time to research the company and know what it can offer you. Objectives are usually five to 10 words long, but those are an important five to 10 words.

So, in summary (or as the French might say, au resume), you have to research the position for which you are applying, choose your experiences off your Fat List that directly apply to the position, and make sure all of the things you choose will somehow enhance your stature as an employee.