“Prospective employers spend 15 to 20 seconds browsing a résumé before moving on to the next,” Suzanne Ducharme, vicepresident of G.S. Schwartz & Co. Inc., said.
With all the competition, BYU-Idaho students are encouraged to start writing résumés early in their college career in order to get ahead.
“I was required to write one in my first English class here on campus,” Katie Cavanaugh, a senior from Sitka, Alaska, said.
Beyond the classroom, students resources can utilize various campus aids.
When Christal Deiber, a senior from Evanston, Wyo., was applying for an internship she took her résumé to the Career Center. “They sat down with me and helped me format my résumé for each company I applied,” Deiber said.
Once the body of a résumé is done, students should consider ways to make it look visually appealing.
“Prospective employers are looking through hundreds of applicants. They aren’t looking for your qualities; they are looking for a reason to eliminate you,” Jordan Dayton, a senior from North Canton, Ohio, said.
The first step is to establish a hierarchy of information. Students need to identify what is most important and choose how to emphasize it. Emphasis can be made with different font styles or sizes.
This suggestion does come with a warning. “Some students just go buck wild with fonts,” Lindsey Parker, a senior from Manteca, Calif., said. “Use one font for your name and heading, then mix it up by putting the body text in another.”
Students should use very simple fonts when writing their resumes with no more then two styles.
“Flowery fonts look unprofessional and are distracting,” Caryn Esplin, an instructor in the Communication Department said.
The second area students should be aware of is alignment. “Too often students will center their contact information, left align their headings and then right align the body text,” Esplin said. By sticking with just one alignment, students make their resumes easy for employers to follow.
Resumes should look consistent and clean.
Step three is spacing. Margins can be anywhere from one to two inches. “Be generous with your white space, don’t feel like you have to fill the page from end to end,” Parker said. Students may want to leave a little more space at the bottom of the paper so the resume looks optically centered.
While simple design techniques will catch the reader’s eye, skills are what will win the position.
HELPFUL LINKS