Jason's Lean Resume Guide - Header

Jason's Lean Resume Guide - Header

(Work in progress, please have patience!)

• Header
• Education
• Experience
• Other Sections
  • Projects
  • Publications and presentations
  • Skills/Hobbies/Interests
• Formatting
  • Which font should I use?
  • Is my resume ATS compliant?
  • Final Polish

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Sitting at the top of your resume, the header is literally the first-first impression of your resume. It's very simple, but there are some tricks...

Q: What should be there?

Your name, obviously. Legal name preferred.

Your email and phone number. Absolutely required.

Not required, but extremely common: Your LinkedIn.

If you are in a creative field, or programming, you should have a link to your portfolio. A simple GitHub or image gallery can give people a much better idea of your work.

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Q: What shouldn't be there?

Your address. The company is not going to mail a response to you. If you've moved around a lot, then putting the city/state isn't a bad idea.

Your picture.

Your age.

Your marital status.

Your religion. Or any other personal information.

(Note: Some of this does change for various non-US resumes. Do a bit of googling on this.)

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Q: What about my Objective Statement? Summary Statement? Areas of Expertise?

Oof. This is a can of worms.

Okay, first off, nobody uses Objective Statements. It's a redundancy. Your objective is to get this job.

I've never been convinced that anyone actually reads Statements. This means that you are wasting a big chunk of valuable above-the-fold space on something that is going to be skipped over anyway.

If you choose to do this, go with a Summary Statement. These are surprisingly easy to write, and at the same time, there is so much bad advice on them. Do this:

Come up with 3-4 of your "greatest hits". Did you increase sales by 300%? Did you sell refrigerators to Inuit? Were you awarded the key to the city? Jot these down. Do a quick add-up of your years of experience. 6 years of customer service? 2 years of underwater basket-weaving? 4 years of yo-yo master? Jot those down too.

Now, link it all together. "Yo-yo master with over 4 years experience. Increased sales by 300%. Sold refrigerators to the Inuit. Awarded key to the city." Bang. You are done.

One final bit of advice: Take it easy with the adjectives on your statement. Saying you are experienced is self-revealing. "Adaptable" "fun" "adventurous" "quick-thinking" or other statements need to be backed up otherwise they sound self-aggrandizing. And nothing annoys people more than ego.

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Q: What about skills sections??

*sigh* So, one of the ways that people came up with to get around the ATS was to list keywords that they thought would trick the computer. Then when the program got smart enough to spot blocks of keywords, they renamed them "skills" and pretended it wasn't the same thing.

There are three problems with skills sections. First off, like statements, I don't think they get read. Reviewers (the six-second guys you hear about) will probably skip right to your experience or education. Hiring teams probably aren't impressed with a list of words either.

Secondly, skills lists give no context. I work in communications, and a common requirement you see on job listings is "Social Media". Problem is that running a social media campaign on Facebook is very different from posting cat memes. Likewise, using Photoshop in a professional arena is different from knocking together a meme. Being a professional carpenter is different from hanging your aunt's shelves.

Finally, a well-crafted resume will have your skills built-in. Know Microsoft Office? Say so in your bullets. "Crafted a 15-card PowerPoint presentation featuring an Excel pivot-table updated in real-time from an Access database" sounds infinitely more impressive than "Knows Microsoft Office".