Making Your Ideal Resume: Harvard Career Expert Advice

The very thought of writing a resume can be quite depressing. But in reality it is not so difficult. Harvard career experts detailed how the perfect resume should look. And you can make it yourself.

Фото: Depositphotos

Not sure where to start? Harvard Career Specialists with CNBC offer useful tips.

1. Adapt resume to vacancy

According to experts, a huge number of candidates send exactly the same resumes across dozens of vacancies. This cannot be done. Your resume should be tailored to the job and type of job you are applying for. You do not need to change every small detail, but the resume itself should reflect the skills and experience that a particular potential employer can evaluate.

2. Add contact information

Lack of clear contact information is one of the five most common resume mistakes. Be sure to include your email address and phone number. Go the extra mile and add LinkedIn (make sure it's up to date) or a website that shows examples of your work.

No need to include:

• list of links: do not indicate “links available upon request” - HR managers will ask for this if necessary;
• photo: It doesn’t matter how talented you are at taking selfies - adding a photo of yourself risks looking unprofessional;
• age or gender: again, this is a summary, not a Tinder profile ...

3. Use action verbs

Your resume is a marketing tool. Avoid cliched and overly general statements such as “results-oriented,” “team player,” “excellent communication skills,” or “hard worker.”

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Your goal is to provide specific information about what you did in your previous posts, what your actions led to tangible results. Use action verbs. Here are some examples.

Leadership:

• Organized A series of guest lectures featuring over 40 prominent researchers in sleep medicine.
• Coordinated Media campaigns for Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
• Headed more 20 design projects for non-profit and social enterprises in the USA, Mexico, India, Zambia and Australia.

Communications:

• Provided monthly, quarterly and annual expense reports to the CEO.
• Collaborated with business teams in order to optimize the production plan.
• Headed implementation of a technical project worth 50 million dollars for 10 major US airports (designed to support more than 15 000 employees); increased productivity by 12% and reduced lost luggage costs by 8%.

Technical issues:

• Added first paging network throughout India; Managed operations and customer support with a team of 70 agents.
• Built a new model of baggage fees and predicted an income stream of $ 12 million by predicting changes in the procedure for checking baggage of passengers.
• Installed Macintosh systems for more than 30 new employees; taught employees how to use software and computer rules of the company

Organization:

• Cut 30% application testing time by automating shorter testing steps for out-of-cycle projects.
• Monitored IT annual budget for 1 billion dollars for 2012 and 2013.
• Cooked sales and performance reports; reduced report response time by 50%.

4. Make Resume Presentable and Lightweight

Your hiring manager's time is valuable, so a resume that is too long risks being left unread.

What can and should be done:

• be consistent in format and content,
• keep the white space balance
• use constant spacing, underline, italics, bold and capital letters to highlight,
• list the headings in order of importance,
• in the headers list the information in reverse chronological order (first, the latest data),
• make sure that the formatting was transferred correctly if you converted the file to PDF,
• put everything on one page (if you are a professional middle-aged or mature, a maximum of two).

What can not be done:

• do not read the resume,
• use a narrative style
• use personal pronouns (for example, “I”),
• start each line from the date
• Use a sophisticated template with lots of colors.

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