Alright people, gonna be sending out my first tweetstorm later today. It's all about #resumewriting advice

But first, a little background:
Over the past 10+ years, I've personally provided feedback/advice to help dozens of people land jobs and revised their resumes /1

I'm hoping the advice is intuitive and easy-to-follow. And since this advice comes after seeing hundreds of resumes, you'll get the feedback you need that hiring managers are looking for - something that many recruiters can't do or might not have the time to do /2

First and foremost, your resume is a story. Make sure to tell a good story
/3

As you well know, resumes get skimmed
- Visual flow is important
- most eye time is spent on top line (company name & title) and numbers (which stand out)
You may have have a small summary below each role, but the bulk should be bulleted
/4

Use a template - formatting is a pain, so use a template that’s already handled it
- Even better, try out @creddle - the site has several nicely designed free templates and allows you to swap them easily since content is kept separate from the design
/5

- Keep it to one page - unless you’ve had a long illustrious career, shorter = better
- Eliminate wordiness, especially in bullet points - short isn’t bad if it gets the message across /6

Include good qualitative and quantitative information
- Don’t just recite a list of responsibilities that could be found in a hiring job description
-- If you list a role - say “Product Manager” - the assumption is that you are doing all the standard product manager tasks
/7

-- Call out job functions outside the usual role to indicate outsize responsibility
- Call out accomplishments & major achievements
- Add metrics
-- example “increased revenue 25% in first year” (or e.g. "Led in-store sales which resulted in 50% year-over-year sales increase")
/8

Watch your tone
- make sure summary/bullet points don’t have critical undertones for any of your roles
- HR & recruiters want to see that you’ve parted with previous companies peacefully
- caveat: Hiring managers at inexperienced companies may like it
/9

Resume submitted online will go through an ATS (applicant tracking system)
- Resumes get filtered based on years experience, keywords, location, etc.
- Keyword stuffing is bad
- Make sure you include important words related to an existing role or the role you are applying for
/10

When you are deep in the job search - don’t have just one resume
- What kind of job are you looking for? It helps to tailor the specific tasks from each of your previous experiences, so that they apply to that type of role
- Tailor your resume per job, title, location, etc.
/11

-- For example, if you are applying for a Product Manager role and Project Manager role, you may want separate resumes, each highlighting the specific responsibilities from previous roles that are more closely aligned with each
/12

-- This is especially important if the roles are not remotely related (applying for jobs as Financial Analyst and also Project Manager)
- Ideally, individual resume per applied job - but that might be a bit crazy
/13

If you are shifting careers or applying to a different market (e.g. moved countries), you may want to include a brief summary with each role to explain the company, industry and overview of the job
/14

If you are trying to move over to another position, hiring mangers may not be familiar with the set of tasks that someone in your current department does, which means they can't easily determine if those skills apply to the new position.
/15

- Spell check!!!!!
- Make sure your formatting is consistent (seriously - not doing this is sloppy)
- I don’t like fancy formatting, other than for the title/role, but some people do
/16

Most Recent job first, obvi
- Current job = present tense & past jobs = past tense
- Your most recent jobs should have more bullet points listed than previous jobs
/17

If you are fresh out of college, education can be first
- If you have relevant internship or work experience (even part time), list that first
- Education should list dates btw & include type of degree and major
/18

Make sure to include your phone number & email (address is optional these days)
You can have a skills section
- Make sure to list things you are proficient in, not software/skills you used once and never touched again
/19

Scrap the Objective - it's usually useless and filler
- caveat: some industries may require this. Know your audience and industry

Don’t include “references available upon request...”
/20

When you’ve had multiple roles at a single company, list each title out separately - it shows job progression and growth
/21

For example, don’t just list
“Microsoft”
“Senior Director of ProductJan 2000 - Present”
- i did some stuff here
- i increased some stuff 100%

/22

Go with
“Microsoft”
“Senior Director of ProductJan 2010 - Present”
- i did some stuff here
“DirectorApril 2004 - Dec 2009”
- i increased some stuff 100%
“ManagerJan 2000 - March 2004”
- def did some more stuff too

/23

* Make sure you aren't describing the same functions multiple times. Your bullets shouldn’t be repetitive
/24

Here’s some more great resume advice from CareerCup, specifically for tech
https://www.careercup.com/resume 
/25

Lastly - when you actually send your resume, save as a PDF and send that. It ensures it will look nice (and not lose formatting)
/26

If you found this helpful please RT

Follow me too - i rarely tweet, but when I do, it's all things tech, startup, biz, & career