Your resume forms both the recruiters and the client’s first impression of you for their role. It is therefore essential that your resume is well presented, well written, and that it presents your skills and experience favourably but honestly.
Structure
Inexperienced recruiters may tell you that resumes should not be more than 3 pages long. If you have worked for 20+ years it is not practical to summarise that length of experience adequately in a couple of pages. At the same time, if you go over say, 10 pages, it is unlikely to be read in full. Progressively condense your older work experiences.
If you have a technical summary in your resume, only include current skills and technologies. (No-one is interested if you used PL1 or COBOL 20 years ago.)
Keep the structure of your resume simple and easy to read (see “Content” below).
Try not to use columns – most of us read left-to-right.
Try not to use multiple tables, as they can “roll’ over the bottom of the recipient’s screen and then the layout looks messy and unprofessional. The “KISS” principal rules here.
Keep the fonts simple (say, Ariel or Times Roman).
Think about the age of the intended reader. Whether it be a recruiter or potential employer who will be reading your resume, the odds are their eyes are no longer “20-20” so do not use any font size less than 10 or 11 for the main text. It is fine to use 2-3 font sizes depending on headings.
Do not use all sorts of fancy hidden settings (tables too) throughout your resume, as the recruiter will want to ‘copy’ your resume into their header and footer layout if they are short-listing you to the client. (They should not be rewriting your resume in case they accidentally skew a meaning.)
An electronic resume should be sent in Word format, rather than as a PDF document.
Most recruitment consultancies and in fact many large companies now utilise CRM and HR systems to manage workflow. Many of these systems utilise key words and lexicons for searching. When your resume arrives electronically it will usually be parsed by the system automatically. These systems tend to have a limited number of fields per resume. This means that if you put critical information on the back page, it may not be picked up and stored, and you may therefore not be near the top of a search results list.
Content
Following, is an generalised content layout for any senior candidate:
- Page 1:-
Firstly – Name, address, personal email & contact numbers. Do not put your work number or work email if this might cause a problem. There is no need to include any note about marriage, children, religion, etc.
Next – Executive Summary: Brief 2-4 paragraphs about your history (roles & industries/companies) and what A) technical and B) personal skills and attributes stand you apart.
Lastly – tertiary education and courses (2 sub headings are okay here).
Note: if you have a heavy technical background, you may want to list these skills here as well (this may become “Page 2”).
- Page 2:-
Key Achievements – this page is made up of a number of short paragraphs that show you can manage people and achieve good results in either line management and/or project environments.
- Page 3 (on onwards):-
Reverse chronology of your career.
By paragraph: note date, company and position (these may be vertically stacked or on one line). Next line (or 2) is ‘who the company is’ if it is not a “blue chip” which people will tend to know of.
Next go into what your key responsibilities were, then next sub-heading what your key achievements were – in more detail (though there may well be some overlap with Page 2). As a rule of thumb, the last 5 years might take 3 pages, the previous 5 years 2 pages, then anything earlier tightly summarised to 1 page.
Generally you should take up about 5-8 pages overall if you have 20+ years of experience. Remember, employers are basically “buying” the last 5 years (front of mind knowledge) then next 5 years (back of mind knowledge and older ‘technologies’) as anything older than 10 years is ‘building blocks’ so this oldest experience needs to be quite brief.
Senior recruiters do like to know how your career has moved over time, so do not simply truncate your resume at, say, 10 years if you have 20+ of experience.
If you have a heavy technical bent (eg, senior technical architect, security specialist, WAN specialist, etc) you should have your technical summary as Page 3, so it does not get missed by the HR system parsing process – if you put it at the end, it probably will be missed. One point here for IT candidates: do not include “dead” technologies. Unless it is relevant to the roles you are applying for, no-one is interested that you programmed in PL1 or COBOL 20 years ago (same with Win95, Primos, Ingres, DB2, ad nauseam).
Do not in any circumstance include referee details at the end of your resume. A lot of recruiters are taught to look for these on resumes and utilise them for marketing calls. This really irritates referees and can spoil a good referee from speaking for you. If you must, it is sufficient to note they “will be provided upon request”.
