What is a resume?

A resume is a summary of educational qualifications, professional skills, achievements, work experience and extra curricular talents. It is a tool that you would use to market yourself to a company before or during an interview. A resume needs to stand out and be distinct in such a way that it catches the attention of a recruiter while he/she is short listing a few candidates from a huge pile of resumes. And so resume writing is one of the most crucial and important tasks for a job seeker, as it is a resume that can fetch you an interview call.

To begin writing a resume, the first thing to do is to create a list of main headings and their sub points on a rough sheet of paper. Some main headings could be:
Contact details
Objective
Career skills
Education
Experience
Achievements
Extra curricular activities

Using these points you will start writing the fair draft of your resume.

Before you begin with writing your resume, its important to determine your career objective. After mentioning contact details on your resume, your objective should follow next. Objective depicts a job seekers goal clarity and will catch an employers attention if it is well expressed. Your objective should clearly state the kind of work you want to do. Also, an objective should be crisp, realistic, relevant and one which reflects your ambition & passion for work.

Next you should mention your educational qualifications with the most recent one listed at the top along with academic honours if any. Followed by your work experience listed in reverse chronological order i.e. first you mention your previous/ present job and then moving backward till your first job.

After you have mentioned these, there could be some other but relevant information like your career skills, trainings attended, projects handled, extra curricular activities or achievements and so on, which can be an integral part of your resume.

Once you have completed writing your resume, do proofread it for a spelling and grammar check. You may also get it read by your two to three friends to get some feedback. It is equally important to format the document in a manner that would give it a neat look and would distinctly highlight the beginning of each section, thus making it easily readable. It is advisable to keep the headings in bold and mention the points under each heading in bullets. Use simple font style, a font size ranging from 10-14 and avoid ALL CAPITAL letters except for the headings.

So far, we discussed what should be the contents of your resume. But, there are certain untapped aspects of a resume that can leave an indirect impact on the employer and help you tackle some of your crucial points effectively. Following are some suggestions that would help you give a new angle to your resume:

-Read your resume from the perspective of an employer and ask yourself if you would call the candidate for an interview and consider him for the job. While composing a resume its important to know what employers seek in a resume. Generally the qualities that employers seek are effective communication, honesty, team spirit, motivation, good work ethics, analytical skills, adaptability and so on. So you might want the information in your resume reflect these qualities.

-If you have gaps in your work tenure such as full time parenting, maternity leave, travel, full time student etc. then you must mention them in the work experience section along with the respective month and year of the gap.

-While framing the content of your resume, try using some action words like prepared, managed, developed, championed, monitored, presented etc. These words catch the readers attention and have a punch like an advertisement, persuading the reader to buy the product or rightly put - persuading the employer to hire you.

-Finally, dont go overboard with flowery or buzz words in an effort to make your resume attractive as excess of self-praising may begin to backfire at you instead.

Always remember, the purpose of a resume is to generate interest in your favour among prospective employers even if you are amidst fierce competition. Your intention behind writing a resume should be to create interest to an extent that the employer gets persuaded to call you for an interview.

About naukri.com

Naukri.com is India's No 1 job site. It provides a common platform for companies, head-hunters and job seekers to exchange information quickly and effectively. Established in 1997, naukri.com is a division of Info Edge (India) Ltd. (the company has a network of portals - Jeevansathi.com and 99acres.com apart from naukri.com) and is Indias largest Internet Company. Naukri.com is the 5th most popular website in India across all categories with a database of over 9 million registered users and 200,000 live jobs. With over 25,000 companies trusting their experience in them, it has a very large user base. Naukri.com also offers Resumes Services such as Resume Display, Resume Development, Resume Flash and Job Mail.

Being leaders in their space, the company is constantly innovating. Visit them at http://www.naukri.com

Madhurima Sil
Sr. Executive Marketing
Naukri.com