You’ve heard the advice: Once you’re done putting together your resume, ask someone to look it over for you. Putting your work (and yourself) out there to be openly critiqued can feel terrifying. But it can also be the difference between a resume that gets you hired, and one that ends up crumpled on the floor. To show you the importance of getting an outside opinion, we went ahead and did it ourselves. We took the real-life resumes of three Ascend editors and showed them to an expert — Kristi DePaul, CEO of Founders and a personal branding expert. She gave us all of the “do’s” and “don’ts” of resume writing. Resume Do’s If you’re submitting a resume to an automated applicant tracking system, keep the design plain. If it’s going to end up in the hands of an actual person, it’s okay to get a little more creative and eye-catching with your design. Always put your experience in chronological order and use bullet points to help make the details of your experience easier to read and understand. Put the names of the companies you’ve worked at front-and-center, along with your job titles. If a company name isn’t super well-known, include a short sentence describing the organization. Make sure to include quantifiable information in your experience descriptions. Concrete numbers will help the person looking at your resume make sense of your accomplishments. Include a “headline” under your name at the top of your resume that describes who you are or the type of role you’re seeking. Resume Don’ts Your resume’s “education” section doesn’t need to be at the very top (unless you’ve just graduated and don’t have much experience). And you can leave your high school education off completely (again, unless you’ve recently graduated). Avoid using large paragraphs of text to explain your experience, and don’t focus only on describing the responsibilities of a given role. You want to share what you accomplished while in that job, or the impact that you had on the organization. Don’t include a “rating” of your skills. Simply listing out the programs you know or expertise you have is a better approach. Your resume doesn’t have to be one page. If the breadth of your experience requires you to write multiple pages, that’s okay. Subscribe to HBR Ascend on YouTube for more videos on work, life, and everything in between.
