The workforce is a highly competitive realm where everybody is trying to be the best and fall into the good graces of employers. Well, your resume is vital in starting and building a successful career, it is what represents you before employers before you actually get to meet them.
So, it is up to you to build your career from the ground up, and your resume is just a part of that process. Here is how to write your first resume.
1. CREATE A DOCUMENT WITH YOUR VITAL STATISTICS
This is going to form the groundwork for your resume. It should feature all the most commonly seen details on a resume, such as your employment history, contact details, education, and notes about you as a person. This is the stuff you have to slot into the resume, so it is a good idea to keep it on a separate document so you may copy and paste it onto each resume you create.
2. THINK UP ALL THE GOOD AND POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF
Now that you have your vital statistics, you need lot of good and positive statements about yourself. This information will fill out your resume and will highlight the fact that you are perfect for the job. Try to make your positive statements just one or two sentences long, and try to make them so that they may stand-alone.
The reason for this is so that you can copy and paste them anywhere into your resume. You can bunch them together at the beginning or end to create your starting blurb or your finishing conclusion. Or, you can slot them anywhere into your resume to remind your new employer that you are perfect for the job.
3. CONSIDER WHAT MAKES YOU A BETTER EMPLOYEE THAN OTHER PEOPLE
When you are coming up with positive things to say about yourself, it is sometimes a good idea to consider the flaws of others and show how you are not as broken as they are. For example, many managers that pay low wages often have to deal with high absenteeism. Pretending to be ill in order to get off of work is a flaw that a lot of people have, so why not make a statement about how you have not missed a day of school or college in the last five years?
Other people smoke marijuana (weed) and think it is okay, other people come into work hung over, other people get jobs just to quit after a few weeks. These are all flaws that other people have, so why not highlight the fact that you do not have these flaws and that you are different from everybody else?
4. EXPLAIN WHY YOU WANT THE JOB
One of the things that most people miss on their resume is why they actually want the job in the first place. Many people send out the same resume to numerous companies, so it is impossible to explain why they want the job without it sounding a little nutty. However, you are creating a custom resume for every employer you apply to, so you are quite able to fully explain why you want the job.
5. SHOW THAT YOU KNOW WHAT THE JOB IS ALL ABOUT
As previously mentioned, the employer is taking a big risk when hiring you because it is a form of investment. Every day you turn up at work, you are costing the employer money up until the point you are providing (profitably) more value than the cost of your wage. The stakes are high, so the employer would like some reassurance that you know what you are getting yourself into. The people that know what a job is all about are far less likely to quit than the people that have fallen into a job they do not like.
6. HIGHLIGHT ALL OF YOUR EXPERIENCE
Your experience is not limited to the things you have done for an employer. Your experience involves anything you have learnt in the real world, be it when you were stuck up a mountain and had to learn how to hunt goats with rocks, to the time you helped your nana scrape the boils off of her feet for a week.
Try to make yourself appear to be a well-rounded person. Highlighting your six weeks of part-time dog walking is not going to make you appear very special or unique. Think about the things you include and how they reflect on you as a person. Remember the employer is looking for a person that will get along well with the other members of staff that will follow orders and learn quickly. You can write your resume in a way that suggests you have all of these qualities, maybe through expressing the things you like, the things you have done and the things you would like to do.
