Introduce your resume with a well-written cover letter, personally addressed to the executive most likely to make the hiring decision. A customized letter, like the one in Figure 1, gets more attention than an impersonal one. Of course, if you have especially relevant expertise or experience, put that (briefly) in the cover letter also.

Generally, it's simply not necessary to list your height, weight, political and religious affiliations, birth date, marital status, hobbies, and outside interests in your resume. Only rarely are personal data relevant. Employers don't necessarily care about these things--they want a track record. If you want to work abroad, it would be an advantage to cite fluency in foreign languages. Or if you're applying for a job with a church group, you might want to mention your religion, if it coincides. But skip all the details that aren't about job performance.

Don't list references. "Available on request" is all the prospective employer needs to know. These are the reasons:

You prefer to tell the prospective employer about yourself personally. Your choice of references may change according to the job opportunities. The people who serve as your references shouldn't be called every time you send out a resume.

Letters of reference are another controversial area. Some recruiters say that they can no longer get an unvarnished report on anyone in writing. References are often reluctant to be candid because of increased possibility of legal actions.

Don't include a salary requirement or a salary history even if requested. You don't want to be limited by your current salary. You don't want to be classified as "desperate." Nor do you want to commit to a salary before you know your job duties.

Writing Style

Some basic guidelines, as described below, could improve job seekers' resumes.

Should you include a job objective in your resume? This has always been, and probably will remain, a controversial issue among job counselors and professional resume writers. There are pros and cons for including as well as excluding a precise description of the job that you seek. Some experts firmly believe that you should state a specific job objective in a resume. Their argument is that the omission of an objective forces the prospective employer to deduce from your stated qualifications just what type of position you are applying for.

You're better off, other experts say, not listing a job objective as a separate heading. This gives your would-be employer greater flexibility in considering you for any number of peripheral positions that your experience and training qualify you for, perhaps even future openings that do not yet exist.

I believe it's a mistake to assume you'll get more offers by presenting yourself as someone who can do anything. Therefore, the focused resume is best; you should target yourself. Using today's personal computers, you can easily change your resume and therefore direct it to a particular job and organization. Use the computer's power! Your chance of communicating your value to the employer is better when you customize your job-seeking resume to your job objectives, your capabilities, and the specific job opportunity. Focus on job-related strengths.

Don't just list where you worked and what you did. Focus your resume on your skills and how well you did your assignments. Tell how well you did each one. In doing so, lean heavily on "power words": "designed," "directed," "created," "caused," "saved," etc. And rather than using the tired ". . . am seeking a challenging position," say ". . . am seeking a challenging opportunity that will permit me to apply my computer expertise in areas where computing and information resources are not realizing their full potential."

The problem with most resumes is that they assume that the potential benefits to prospective employers will be self-evident to the reader. Instead of saying, "Responsible for engineering design," for example, say "Organized and directed an engineering design that reduced by 20 percent the number of installed parts without loss of performance." Similarly, instead of saying, "Sales manager for five years," say "Sales manager with a progressive engineering firm where I achieved a successful five-year record of opening up six new territories."

Using this style of presentation, you are far more likely to strike a "potential benefit nerve," one that matches an employer's needs.