Five Tips for a Professional Resume

The first and foremost thing that you should work upon in your career-building process, is your resume. Your resume is essentially an elevator pitch about yourself, given the fact that your resume is going to be the first document that you’d be sharing with anybody you’re reaching out to, it makes 100% sense to spend some quality time and effort making it the best one.

Although by “best” I don’t mean best in an aesthetic sense, I mean it in terms of content. Yes, you are free to use professional fonts like Arial, Cambria, etc. along with columns for structure, but try and refrain from using unnecessary images and pictures.

Personally, also I don’t exactly understand the logic of using templates where you have a “rating” for the skills you mention, simply because your rating your skill introduces a bias (could be exaggeration or understatement but either way not relative to any standard of comparison).

I would rather suggest you all to go simple and use the “Resume Serif” template from Google Docs but there are plenty of others. Another aspect of a ‘Freshers Resume’, which you should know for sure is that your resume should be exactly one page long. If your mind says something like “But I have 100 projects, how do I fit them all”, the answer is - you don’t. Remember the resume is meant to showcase what you can deliver right away, the skills you’re confident in, and the best in.

So, if you list MS Excel in your skills section, for example, please ensure it is because you’ve done a lot of work in MS Excel. Ability to just “Find prime numbers in a given range” doesn’t count. You can also go using hyperlinks in your resume, this allows you to link detailed content without taking up too much space.

Understand that a resume is a list of your abilities and achievements but it should not falls short of conveying additional context about various things, such as - Why do you want to join the company? Why would you be a good fit culturally? So whenever you sit to draft a resume keep the following points in your mind:

Match your skills with the organizational requirements. Exhibit why would you be a good fit for the company. This allows for them to be able to judge if you would be a good fit culturally or not.
Describe your projects, leadership positions that you’ve held in your Secondary School and college, essentially any meta-skills that are relevant to the role that you’re applying for. Try to use quantifiable measures, and numbers when describing the impact of your work.
Please do not try to make these documents generic. We try to go for generic resumes so that we can blast them in masses to a lot of companies together, but doing so is fine for companies that you are not entirely interested in.

But for the ones that you want to give your best, make sure to personalize accordingly, for example, add relevant technologies (that you actually are skilled in) based on the company and remove anything that you think is not relevant.
When you are adding descriptions to internship experiences, or achievements use power words such as “achieved,” “earned,” and “accomplished". Here are a few examples with active language:
a) Increased team production by 10%.
b) Led a team of 3 on a special project.
c) Surpassed sales quota by over 15%.
Craft a career snapshot.
More recently, career experts have urged to do away with the old “objective” statement and instead consider including a brief summary, called a “career snapshot,” at the top of a resume.
With the career snapshot, you present a branding statement that briefly explains your unique value as well as your skills and qualifications. This should then be followed by a few bullet points that highlight your corporate experience and your accomplishments. Whatever you list here should be relevant to the position you’re applying to.