Introduction
Congratulations! You’ve decided to write a resume and you’re well on your way to securing a job in tech.
And by the end of this guide you should have an amazing resume to use.
But first things first: What is a resume?
A resume is an advertisement for yourself as an employee. It’s a marketing tool used to sell yourself to potential employers.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything from formatting and design tips to templates and examples of great resumes so that your application get’s noticed by the right people.
And if you want to skip to the sections that are most relevant to you, click on the following links below:
But before we start, let’s talk about why you should write a resume.
Why Should You Write a Resume?
There are many reasons and benefits to why you should write a resume. But the most apparent reason why resumes are essential is that they help employers see the value you can bring to their company.
Also, resumes are essential because they play an important role in your job search.
From selling who you are as an employee to helping you figure out where you excel the most, a resume is a tool that puts everything together.
Without a resume, you look unprepared and disorganized as employers require them to get the interview process started.
Additionally, without a resume how are employers supposed to interview you if they have nothing to go off of?
So having that resume on hand will help you tell the story about your career and what you’ve achieved.
Furthermore, it’ll also open doors for you to get interviewed by potential employers as they will have something tangible.
And if you create a resume the right way, it can even help land the job. Instead of losing it to someone else that may have a better resume.
For more insights into why resumes are essential, check out our article Why Are Resumes Important?
Now that you know the importance of a resume, how about we get started with formatting your resume.
Resume Formatting
The first thing you must worry about when writing your resume is formatting.
This is a pretty broad topic as it encompasses many things, but what you need to focus on are the following items such as:
- Type of Resume to Use
- Resume Templates to Use
- Spacing and Margins
- Fonts & Font Sizes
- Length of Resume
If you take care of these items first before you start writing, the rest will fall into place very quickly.
And the reason why formatting is crucial is that with a great format, you can make a resume that employers can easily read.
Which separates your resume from the rest as employers need to be able to read your resume within 5-7 seconds.
Otherwise, they will throw out your resume, as employers hate hunting for information.
So let’s dive in and see what we need to do first with your resume!
Type of Resume to Use
When creating a resume, there are three different types of resume formats that you can use which are:
- Reverse Chronological
- Functional
- Hybrid
These three formats are good to use, but the format that will work best is reverse chronological.
The reverse chronological format is a resume format that heavily emphasizes your work experience and career progression.
And since employers value work experience the most, reverse chronological will best highlight those experiences quickly.
Additionally, reverse chronological formatting is great as this format is the most popular among employers, according to Robert Half.
Now, if you don’t have much experience, don’t worry. You can also use the other two formats above.
Functional and Hybrid formatting can help you fill in your resume gaps as they focus more on skills and projects.
If you want to learn how to create those types of resumes, watch these videos:
Now that you understand which format to use, take a look below at the different template builders you can use.
Templates Builders To Use
After learning about reverse chronological resume formatting, we now need to find a resume template builder to get us started.
You will want to use a resume template builder instead of creating your own template as pre-made templates help with:
- Saving time and energy when creating a resume
- Following all the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) guidelines, so your resumes don’t get rejected
- Design as they are created by experts who have a plethora of experience in the job-hunting space
- Also are easily scannable as they are meant to be read in 5-7 seconds
- Following all resume formatting guidelines
Those are just the main benefits of using a pre-made template. Furthermore, when using a pre-made template, some providers offer tools to help you create your resume better.
Which makes the process of creating a resume easier and faster! Allowing you to focus on job hunting, not tweaking or creating more resumes.
But enough talk about the benefits of pre-made templates, here are template providers that offer downloadable resume templates that are in the reverse chronological format:
- ResumeGenius
- EasyResume
- MyPerfectResume
- ResumeLab
- NovoResume
With those websites above, you’ll have everything that you need as they handle everything for you.
And, of course, if you don’t want to build your resume yourself, reach out to us as we’re here to help!
Start by going to our Services page to book your intake call today.
Spacing and Margins
When using those template builders above, the spacing and margins should already be taken care of.
But if you want to tweak the resume template that you used, you should learn about the standard spacing and margins that need to be used.
Most hiring managers prefer to see 1-inch margins on your resume.
However, if you need to adjust the margin, you can also change it to a 1/2 inch margin. But don’t go any lower as you run the risk of ruining your formatting.
Then for line spacing, keep it to either single space or 1.5 spacing to make your resume easily scannable.
Moreover, you also need to ensure there isn’t too much white space in the resume, as you need to put down as much relevant info as possible while spacing out individual sections of your resume.
Following those margin and spacing rules, your resume should be spectacular when converted to a PDF format.
Fonts and Font Sizes
Another formatting tip you will want to look after is the fonts you use and the font sizes.
During the font selection process of resume writing, the fonts that are best to use are:
- Times New Roman
- Ariel
- Georgia
These three fonts are usually best to use as they’re easily read and recognized by most employers.
If you pick out other fonts outside of those three, you may risk choosing a font that is not easily scannable, as employers need to be able to scan your resume in 5-7 seconds.
Moving onward, after you’ve picked out your resume font, also pay attention to the sizing of your font.
The size, whether big or small, can make or break the formatting of your resume.
The best sizes that you should use are 10.5 – 14 pts. To break it down, here’s what you can follow:
- For headings, usually stick to 11.5 – 14 pts depending on how much space you have on your resume to give
- For content and bullet points, stick to 10.5 – 12 pts, as you can make the most out of the space on your resume.
Following the font and font size guidelines will also make your resume the perfect length.
Resume Length
The last formatting tip you must follow is to ensure your resume doesn’t exceed 1-2 pages.
For an entry-level job seeker or career changer looking to break into tech, 1-2 pages will give you plenty of space to highlight your experiences.
You don’t want to exceed 1-2 pages for your resume, as longer resumes will show that you are not concise or organized.
Additionally, no employer wants to read a 5-page long resume as they already don’t have the time to hire people as it is.
If you make your resume any longer, you will ultimately lose the employer’s attention, and they will likely skip over your resume.
But if you keep it to 1-2 pages, you can provide a clear summary and progression of your career and achievements.
And it will be much quicker for employers to consider you as a candidate as everything will be right there for them to see.
That is only if you follow all the other guidelines in this post.
Additional Formatting Rules
Now that you have the general formatting tips to follow, here are some other tips and rules that you should follow to best format your resume:
- Avoid first-person pronouns (I, me, and my)
- For current jobs, use present tenses, and for past jobs, use past tenses.
- Stick to the date formatting you choose to use! (It’s usually best to talk in terms of months and years, such as “May 2020 – March 2022,” when talking about start and end dates)
- Use bullet points to describe responsibilities and achievements from past jobs (preferably 4-5 bullet points for each experience)
- Divvy up your resume into sections so that recruiters can scan it (Contact, Professional Summary, Education, Experience, Skills, and Awards and Activities)
- Lastly, when you are done writing your resume, make sure you save the file to PDF format with the name: First Name Last Name – Company Name Resume or First Name Last Name – Resume (Ex. Nick Niles – XYZ Company Resume or Nick Niles – Resume)
These additional rules will give you a leg up over other candidates as these will make your resume stand out in a sea of mediocre resumes.
If you need more tips on resume formatting beyond the ones here, take a look at How to Format a Resume, as there many ways to optimize your resume.
How to Write a Resume
Sections of your Resume
Since you have learned about formatting your resume, now comes the most challenging part, writing it.
To begin writing your resume, you need to separate it into different sections to highlight yourself as a person and employee.
And the following sections that you will want to have on your resume are:
- Contact Info
- Professional Resume Summary
- Education
- Work Experience
- Skills
- Awards & Achievements
- References
By having each of these sections included in your resume, your future employer should be able to determine whether or not you’re a fit for the role.
Additionally, your resume and the sections that go along with it should serve to answer questions like:
- How can you make an impact at the company you’re applying to?
- What have you done in your career?
- How can they get ahold of you?
- How much education or specific skill knowledge do you have?
- What have you achieved?
When you answer those essential questions by creating your resume, you are making it that much easier for an employer to say yes to you as a candidate.
So let’s start writing your resume!
Contact Info
The first and most crucial section of your resume is the one that contains your contact info.
Surprisingly and more times than not, job seekers make the resume mistake of not listing their current contact info.
This mistake occurs because they either forget to update their resume when they get a new phone number or email.
Or, two, the job seeker is lazy and is reusing the same old resume without making any tweaks or personalization to it when applying for new jobs.
Don’t let this be you, as this is a very easily avoidable mistake.
And If you use a resume template builder, most likely you will be required to add in this info, as it’s one of the first things they make you do.
But if you want to tweak your resume or make modifications to it, follow these steps when inputting your contact info into your resume:
- Start by center aligning your contact info and by putting it at the very top (Do not put the contact info in the Header, though, as this may mess up your formatting when converting it to a PDF)
- Add your first and last name starting at the top (Bolded and 14 pts preferably)
- Add your cell phone number (12 pts preferably)
- Add your email (12 pts preferably)
- Add your city, state, and zip for where you live (12 pts preferably)
For my resume, I have my contact info listed at the top like this:
As you can see, the contact info is listed front, center, and at the top, so the employer can see this first thing if they do want to get ahold of you.
Furthermore, the contact info listed at the top also serves as an introduction so you can create a name recall with the employer looking over your resume.
Once you complete this part, you will then be ready to move onto the professional summary.
Professional Resume Summary
For professional summaries, these are optional as I have landed jobs with resumes that have included and left off a professional summary.
But professional summaries can add to your resume if you know how to write them well.
Moreover, suppose you don’t have much job experience, and you’re trying to fill the white spaces and gaps on your resume.
In that case, a professional summary comes in handy.
These summaries will give your future employer a quick glimpse of what you’re all about and can serve as an excellent hook to get them to read the rest of your resume.
However, suppose you don’t write your summary well.
A professional summary can also work against you, as employers may find your experience boring or stagnant if you can’t capture their interest immediately.
If you want to include this section on your resume, here are some guidelines to follow when creating this section:
- Be concise and to the point. Use specific details about your experiences and the skills you bring as an employee to paint the picture for an employer.
- Avoid using passive language and generalizations. You need to use concrete details to summarize who you are with active verbs and language.
- Going back to the first point, keep it short. As an entry-level job seeker/career changer, no more than 4-5 lines maximum. In the case of a summary, less is more. So keep it brief!
- Lastly, back up what you are going to say in the resume. If you are going to speak about experiences and skills in the summary, make sure you include those in the following sections of your resume.
Breakdown of a Professional Summary
Using those guidelines above, let’s look at good professional summary example:
Although this professional summary is not for an entry-level job seeker, it still tags on all the guidelines we previously discussed.
This summary first speaks to the candidate’s experience in the field they are applying for (which is in software engineering, web development, and leadership).
Secondly, it breaks down the candidate’s skills, such as their technical experiences and abilities in certain tech areas like PHP and JavaScript Frameworks.
Third, they use active language to describe they have skills and experiences in mentoring and leading teams.
Lastly, it falls within 4-5 lines even though this leader has 9+ years of experience. Everything you need to know about this candidate is within these four lines.
When the employer goes on to reading their resume, they will find that the work experiences back up the summary.
Now I understand that writing these summaries is hard, so if you need inspiration, look up some great examples of professional summaries on Google, Quora, or Reddit.
You should see plenty of examples of people who have written these successfully in the past.
Once you have enough ideas of what to write, you can reverse engineer how those other candidates wrote their summaries to make your original professional summary.
After you write the summary, you now need to list your education.
Education
The easiest section on the resume is the education part. Again, if you use a template builder, all these steps will be formatted for you.
But if you want to make format changes or you need help with what to fill in, here’s what you should do:
- If you only graduated from high school, list that education (If you had a 3.5 GPA or higher, list it, otherwise, keep it off) along with the month and year that you started and graduated and any relevant scholarships or awards that show your academic prowess.
- If you graduated from college with a lower-level degree, list that (Same thing, 3.5 GPA or above list it), along with the month and year that you started and graduated and any relevant scholarships or awards that show your academic prowess.
- If you have a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree list that along with your college’s name, the month and year that you started and graduated, and any relevant scholarships or awards that show your academic prowess.
- If you’re currently going to school while working, list the college name and the degree you are pursuing and put “In Progress” at the end. Then list the year that you started school and the year you expect to graduate
And if none of the above apply to you since you haven’t graduated high school yet.
Well. In that case, this guide is not for you as you need to go back and graduate, as almost every employer will need to see a diploma or GED at the very least.
When listing your education, you can put both high school and college in the education section.
Still, I’d recommend that you only put the highest level of education completed, as it will save space on your resume for more relevant information.
Listing your Education on your Resume
To properly list your education on your resume look at this example below:
Here the candidate lists only the highest education, degree and minor they received, GPA and their start and end dates.
They also put down additional courses and responsibilities that they had during school.
Still, these are minor compared to work experiences, so it’s best exclude additional courses unless they show domain expertise.
Otherwise, this education section tells an employer everything they need to know when comparing this resume to others.
After you have written your education section, you can then move onto your work experience.
Work Experience
To create the work experiences section, you will need to do the following such as:
- List the title and work location (city and state) of the place of employment on the left-hand side. And towards the right side, list the month and year for both the start and end dates of that job
- Then underneath the company name and location, put the highest position you had
- From there, list the three most relevant work experiences for the position you’re applying for. For example, if I were applying for a customer success job, I would put down my last three experiences as a retail sales rep, sales manager, and a customer service-related experience in order from my most recent experience to my oldest
- Then, you will then need to list 4-5 bullet points of your responsibilities and results for each company you have worked for
- After that, you will want to use active verbs and proper tenses. For current jobs, use present tenses, and for past jobs, use past tenses
- Lastly, when writing out your bullet points, use quantifiable results when possible, as tech companies like to see the specific impact that you made at each company you’ve worked for
Now I know it’s hard to write out the work section of a resume. But writing this part out will become much easier if you think of your resume as a selling tool.
Creating the Work Experience Section
To actually write out the work experience section, let’s breakdown one experience from a resume:
As you can see, both the company name and location are listed along with the start and end dates. Then directly below the highest position is listed.
From there, you can see both quantifiable results and responsibilities listed down below.
So for the case of this Sales Engagement Specialist, they figured that Sourced Pipeline or Expected ARR is the most critical metric as top-of-the-funnel activities matter in outbound sales.
Additionally, the second metric shows how many meetings they were able to successfully hold and get accepted by the sales team so that they can close those leads.
Lastly, you see in the last three bullet points how they accomplished those results above, which shows the skills needed to achieve those results.
And imagine you talked about your skills and experiences in the professional summary. In that case, a work experience like this should back up what you said.
If you need a framework for writing out your bullet points, take a look at the following:
- List quantifiable results and achievements first
- Then, list the daily duties and responsibilities you had that helped you achieve the results
- After you write out your most recent work experience, then move onto the older ones repeating the same process
Skills
Now that the hard part is done, the skills section should be a cakewalk as you need to look at yourself to figure out what you are good at.
When creating a resume, you want to look at the job description (JD) to get an idea of what the employer is looking for.
Then compare the JD with your current skills, as you will want to mention those skills that match up with those on the JD.
You will also want to break down your skill level from beginner to expert and the amount of experience you have (in years) with those skills.
Within the skills section, you also need to make a note of soft skills (like communication, both written and verbal) and hard skills (like sales tool knowledge or customer service) that you have.
Mentioning both types of skills will help the ATS recognize that you’re a fit for the job.
Creating the Skills Section
To create the skills section, first, we need to determine what the job and the employer need. We can easily figure this out by looking at the JD:
After looking at both parts of this job description, the following things that stick out to me are:
- Excellent Communication Skills, both written and oral
- Experience with Salesforce and other sales tools
- Passion for excelling in a customer-facing role
- Strong presentation skills
- Creative solutions thinker (Problem Solver)
When writing out this section, you need to be honest with yourself. So don’t worry if all of your skills don’t match up to the JD.
Just put the most relevant skills down that you have that can match up with the JD as you only need to write 4-5 bullet points.
But for me, when I was applying to SDR jobs like this one above, here’s a breakdown of what I wrote:
Here I label my sales tool knowledge and the level of expertise. Then I label the level of communication skills along with my soft and hard skills.
As you can see in the skills section I have, I made sure that I labeled the job’s responsibilities within my skills section and how many years I have done said job.
Lastly, I interweaved all the other skills in the following bullet points so that when the ATS reads the resume, it will match most of the JD.
Which allows me to get my resume in the hands of the hiring manager.
And when using resume template builders, make sure that you only worry about the content as these are your selling points.
Awards & Achievements
After wrapping up the skills section, the last section you need to worry about is the awards and achievements section.
This section is also vital to your resume as it shows your future employer the potential that you have from past achievements.
Additionally, this section can also show who you are as a person inside and outside of work, which can further impress your future employer.
In this section, you only want to list awards and achievements related to your career and career goals.
Creating the Awards and Achievements Section
Take a look at this example of an Awards section on a resume:
The relevant awards on this resume are in speaking, which could easily relate to any sales or customer service job requiring public speaking.
Which is a perfect example of how awards like these show your future aptitude for doing a certain job.
References
At this point, your resume should almost be finished, as there is one last thing you need to address: references.
Now what I recommend and what most employers prefer that you do is make a separate page for references.
This is because your resume should sell the value you bring through your work experiences and skillset.
Not for listing references, as those will most likely be asked for at the end of the decision-making process.
So all you need to do is create a separate page for references.
Then, At the very bottom of your resume, put the statement “References Available Upon Request” in italics so the employer can request them if needed.
If you want to see how this looks, here’s what I have used in the past that works well:
Once you address the references part, your resume should be completed.
Great Examples of Resumes
After going through all the steps above, you should have a well-thought-out and written resume.
And remember, for each job you apply to, make sure you modify it to meet the employer’s needs, as all jobs are different.
If you need inspiration, take a look at these well-written resumes made by Resume Genius to get an idea as to what yours should look and sound like:
If you want more examples of resumes, look at the resources that were mentioned earlier in the template builders section, as you will find plenty of them.
Conclusion
We hope this guide has helped you feel more confident about writing your resume.
Remember, a resume is not only a list of past work experiences; it’s also a way to communicate what kind of person you are and the type of employee who will succeed in an organization.
So make sure that all your words reflect who you are, what makes you unique, and why an employer should hire you!
And now that you have your resume completed, let’s move on to creating the cover letter, which you can learn here at How to Create a Cover Letter.