Resume Tips for Freshers: The Role of a Resume in Your Job Application

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Resume Tips for Freshers: The Role of a Resume in Your Job Application

Resume Tips for Freshers: The Role of a Resume in Your Job Application
- Posted On 2024-08-07
Writing a resume that stands out for a job search is a common struggle. With thousands of candidates and peers vying for the same job, you do not want to send in your candidature with a run-of-the-mill resume. Creating a single-page document that represents your personality and capability in a convincing style may be challenging, particularly for beginners fresh out of college and new to the hustle of the job market. So what techniques should you employ to make your resume striking and catch the employer's attention? This blog brings essential tips on crafting a fetching resume for beginners new to the game.

Defining Resume: Understanding the Role of a Resume in Your Job Application

A resume is a central element of the job application process. It is a statement of a person's educational qualification, experience, achievements, potential, skills, career objectives, and personal information that forms the deciding factor in taking your candidature further towards the appointment process. A resume is the first document, an opener to your chance at the job you want. It communicates who you are, the accomplishments you have made so far, and your potential to carry out the tasks the position demands.

A distinctive resume is one that is crafted in a clear, concise, and thoughtful manner. It stands out because it communicates your strengths, abilities, and potential effectively and succinctly. Employers meet your resume first before they meet you in person. With piles of resumes they see daily, it's critical that your resume catch their attention; hence, creating a compelling resume certainly matters.

Crafting Your Resume: What to Do and What Not to Do?

Let us acquaint you with the basics of writing a strong resume. Before we move on to tips for crafting each essential section of a resume, let us identify what to do and what not to do when writing your resume.

What should your resume include?
- Full name
- Complete contact information: phone number, email ID, home address
- Educational Qualification
- Experience
- Academic/non-academic awards and recognition
- Skill sets
- Internship/Research/Project Experience
- Hobbies/extracurricular activities leading towards awards or recognition
Pointers on what to do?
- Identify and decide your job search objectives and tailor your resume to match the job you are searching for or applying for.
- Ensure that your resume includes skills and qualifications that align with the specific job description by using industry keywords or buzzwords.
- Highlight positive accomplishments and not just responsibilities
- Make sure your resume is in an easily readable format and maintain consistency.
- Share your work experience in strong, action-oriented statements.
- Prioritize your experiences and list the most relevant ones first.
- Follow a reverse chronological order while listing your qualifications, work experience, and achievements, and start with the most recent.
- Use numbers and percentages to quantify and qualify your experience wherever possible.
- Avoid expanding every detail, but stick to highlighting specific accomplishments.
- Highlight transferable skills by expanding on your professional, research, classroom, or voluntary experiences.
- Proofread your resume before sending it out to ensure error-free representation of your candidature. Seek help and feedback from friends, seniors, or advisors.
Pointers on what not to do?
- Avoid using tables or templates provided by some software or website to maintain authenticity.
- Avoid making general claims without backing them up with relevant examples, like good communication skills.
- Avoid misleading your employers. Make a legit and accurate statement of your educational qualifications, skills, and abilities.
- Avoid using generic statements, objectives, and plans. Employers skip them.
- Do not include references on the same page of your resume. Maintain a separate document for references and provide them only when required or requested by the employer.
- A beginner usually only has a one-page resume.
- Send out your resume to multiple positions or organizations that align with your skills and interests.
Solid Tips for Framing Resume Essential Sections

Writing Education Section

To ensure that you come across as a potential candidate, your educational qualification section must communicate your strongest and most relevant qualifications. Mention all your higher education qualifications, beginning with the highest level. You may consider adding certifications, if you have any. Provide the full name of the school/university/institution for all the degrees and certifications. Add the year of attendance and completion or expected time of graduation. Include your academic awards, recognitions, extra-qualifications, and competitive grants related to your academic life. Those with non-academic awards may maintain a separate section and include them in your resume.

Writing the Compelling Experience Section

The trick is to use this section to convey your strongest experience, regardless of whether it was a paid job or an unpaid project/internship experience. List the details of your roles and add a positive impact to the position. Mention the name of the company/organization, location/country, and start and end dates. Quantify your experience and use numerals and percentages to convey your contribution instead of using words. For instance, instead of saying contributed significantly or improved productivity significantly, say contributed 25% to the growth of the company exceeding estimation or 40% enhanced improvement leading to a top performer/contributor award, etc.

Employ professional ways of highlighting your job roles and experience. Do not hesitate to mention a job role or internship experience. You may feel your role as a front desk manager may seem irrelevant, but the skills you built over the duration are equally significant. To avoid crowding and making your resume lengthy, prioritize the most impressive ones and those that are relevant to the job position. It would be ideal if you could tailor and relate your experience to the job description.

Quick Tips:
- Use more than one sentence or bullet.
- Keep the bullets in one or two lines.
- Back up your roles and experience with quantified contributions.
- Use specific and action-oriented statements.
Unique Leadership/Activities Section

This section could prove to be an excellent differentiator for candidates just starting out their job hunt. As a beginner without much work experience to add to your resume, your college leadership activities or experience can fill the gap in work experience for you. Your student-life activities and experiences can lead the potential employer to more detailed insights about your personality. However, the trick here is to list out the more appropriate ones that can add value to a professional setting. Add the contributions you have made or the leadership role you played in student organizations and activities. Provide concrete examples to back up your statements and claims.

Highlighting Skills Intelligently

Your skill set is the driving force of your resume. Add all the relevant skills you possess and classify them into separate listings or columns as technical/hard skills, soft skills, and job-specific skills. Start with the strongest, most in-demand or most marketable skills. Using keywords relevant to the job description will get your resume noticed. Highlighting the proficiency of your skills by mentioning years of using them is a definite eye-catcher. You may add additional skills like language proficiency, etc.

Creating a professionally oriented and impressive resume

Creating a professionally targeted and polished resume is of utmost importance. How well you organize and communicate your credentials in this document can make or break your pursuit of your coveted job. The first impression is always the last impression when it comes to the appearance of your resume. A well-structured resume, concisely covered within a page or two at maximum, will easily catch the attention of the prospective employer. No recruiter is excited to read through pages and pages of a person's eligibility for the job unless you are required to produce. Having a one-page resume is the ideal strategy, except for experienced candidates or those in scientific and technical fields requiring mention of publications.

Quick Tips for Formatting a Professional-Friendly Resume
- Use a decent font size, preferably 12 (depending on the font). Your resume should be easy on the eyes and easily readable.
- Use a professional-oriented font. Avoid using artistic fonts that will distract the reader. Using fonts that overpower the words is a big no. Times New Roman is a good font for your resume.
- Maintain a respectable margin on all sides. Do not overly deviate from the 0.5 margins at either side; also, do not go beyond 0.75 or 1 unit at both sides and top to bottom.
- Ensure sufficient spacing on each line.
- Use abbreviations for months.
Following these steps will help you develop a solid and attractive resume that will widen your chances of getting the job you desire. It is also important for you to note that different organizations and positions will demand varying degrees of skills or expertise. You will have to customize your resume as per the job description and demands of the company. The final thing you need to do is proofread and ensure your resume is free of errors and mistakes. Make sure your resume content and each section follow the same format, be it fonts or size. Providing powerful headings to all the sections of the resume is advisable.

Your resume should be an ideal representation of yourself and should be able to present it in the same way you would present yourself in person. Recruiters spend about 5–10 seconds on average scrutinizing resumes. Hence, clean, polished, and concise resumes will only be able to catch the recruiter's attention. You may be a strong candidate with impressive qualifications, yet without a powerful and fetching resume, your chances of attaining the job you are seeking are slim. Crafting an effective resume is an art that you must master as part of your career journey.