Resume Basic and Foundation

I have been helping my oldest sons work on their first ever resume, and I have been asked to review resumes over the last several years to offer advice. On top of that, I’ve been looking at resumes for reference and hiring for the last several years as well. There are several basics that you should check off before asking for reviews. And never pay for a resume review, there are plenty of people that are happy to help for free.

First, review this blog post: 7 Things They Don’t Teach You In School and this one: How to Prepare for Layoffs

Foundations

1. Submit PDFs unless the application specifically asks for Word. That way formatting survives.

2. Make sure Linkedin and your resume are aligned and consistent. More often than you’d think a recruiter or hiring manager is going to look at Linkedin before they even finish reviewing your resume.

3. Get your custom/personalized Linkedin URL. It’s free, and its quick.

4. Spend some time on your LinkedIn headline.

5. Request recommendations for LinkedIn

6. Use a professional email. Worst case have something like firstname.lastname(@)gmail.com, but even better is a custom domain. You can get a domain for $20, and Google is currently offering a year of workspaces for free.

7. Don’t list your home city. It can introduce location bias.

8. Mirror your resume to job descriptions and ensure you are matching keywords.

Experience

1. Make sure your experience is listed in reverse chronological order.

2. Note contract gigs, especially if they are short duration.

3. Be prepared to explain any gaps, they may also get you filtered in ATS systems.

4. If you’ve been laid off, be prepared to talk to what you did in the interim.

5. For your ‘intro’ paragraph, customize it per job, don’t use AI slop, and make sure to list results and not just ideas. I beat sales quotas 3 quarters in a row by at least 25% versus I consistently beat sales quotas.

   1. For engineering/cyber/tech this could be implementing projects ahead of schedule, this could be reducing lead time for tickets, this could be optimizing processes.

6. For mid to late career, don’t put tech at the top. Tech keywords are minimally helpful. Focus on actions and numbers in your experience.

7. For early career, put internships, projects, and relevant course work on top.

Formatting

1. Use simple text, don’t be fancy

2. More pages are better than forced wording, small text, or missing info.

3. Your resume is a document that helps get you an interview, not the job. Don't try to explain everything.