How Long Should A Resume Be For A College Student

When A Recruiter At A Job Fair Tells Me To Go To The Company Website And Apply Online Is That For Real Or Is It A Brush

Its not a brush-off. Its just a fact of life in the technology age. Recruiters can easily get buried in paper as they travel from job fair to job fair. Companies have moved to the online application process as theyve gotten overwhelmed with applicants. If youve connected with a real person at a job fair, however, capitalize on that face-to-face contact to increase the chances youll get an invitation to interview. After the fair, send a thank-you note to the recruiter with a copy of your résumé and mention that youve also applied online.

Before The Intern Resume

Here’s a checklist of factors that you might want to consider before you proceed with your internship resume:

Introspection

A lot of students will not bother reviewing their options – maybe because they don’t even know if they have any. And it makes sense: why not jump at the first opportunity which presents itself?

But think about it: if you spent hours and days working on your resume for college, wouldn’t you want to be absolutely sure that you are getting the bang for your buck?

An internship is the perfect laboratory for you to identify and realize if a profile/industry that you always admired from afar is as satisfying as you think. A favourable or not-so-favorable experience in a internship can determine your view of that industy for the rest of your life.

For that reason alone, it’s important that you have absolute clarity on what you want. It’s critical that you ask some sincere questions to your inner self before you proceed with any decision:- What are your hobbies and interests?- Is there an industry which you think might be a perfect fit for you but you are still unsure?- What kind of a work culture would suit you? Do you see yourself in a corporate setting or in a startup venture?

Location

Will moving to a different city/country for your internship benefit you in the long run? Who knows if the company which you are targeting also offers dorm-style living arrangements for their interns?

Research

Network

Perseverance

Provide Detail Whenever Possible

The details are what set a resume apart from a list of extracurriculars on a standard college application. For example, when describing your involvement in the French Club make sure to include:

• your role
• school years/hours per week you participated
• specific contributions
• leadership roles
• unique details that will make you stand out

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Resume Layout Design And Formatting: Looks Matter

Layout, design and formatting considerations are super important for a successful college student resume or CV. There are two main reasons for this: visual perception by humans and processing compatibility with automated systems.

Make it easier on recruiters. Employ chunking, which makes the text more readable and digest by breaking it into bite-sized pieces. This is achieved through the use of white space and graphical elements such as boxes, lines, images and other formatting that improves legibility.

Recruiters are likely to pay a lot more attention to your resume if you apply a visually attractive, suitably-formatted template based on research-backed design principles. This is where Resume.io can help you shine above other job applicants. Our CV templatesare created by professionals and field-tested with hiring specialists.

Faulty formatting is the reason 21% of all resumes in the U.S. run into problems or are filtered out by the ATS. Confusing or unreadable layouts, charts or images are common reasons. Avoid formatting problems with our tested templates!

Include A Career Note In A Senior

If you only held one or two positions before the 15-year cut-off, you can provide a short career note that mentions the roles and titles you held.

This format gives you some flexibility, as you may decide to summarize a few very similar roles into a short blurb to keep your resume length under two pages. For instance, you may say that your earlier experience includes … executive assistant work for companies including Company A, Company B, and Company C. If you worked with some name-drop worthy clients, you have the ability to work those details into a blurb like this as well. However, the rule of thumb is to keep this note short and sweet, so eliminate unnecessary details such as employment dates.

Click on the following link to see the entire two-page sample resume for a senior professional.

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What Information And Sections Do You Include In Your Resume

So, what are the most important components that should always be included when making your resume? Theres no one-answer-fits-all, but here are some suggested sections:

• Heading: First things first: at a minimum, the information at the top of your resume should include your name, email address , and phone number. While a physical address is less important for online applications, tradition means that many hiring managers expect it. At least include your city and state.Also, your email address should have an appropriate username. Instead of some goofy or otherwise unprofessional username, simply use your last name and a number . Unfortunately, hisroyalhotness@email.com is not acceptable. As for your phones voicemail message, dont add music or joke around too much. Instead, state your name and that youll return calls as soon as possible. Thats it!

Heres an example for a marketing executive:

This example highlights the individuals expertise in leadership, marketing, and sales. For advanced positions, C-Level especially, such miniature biographies appear more polished than a bulleted list of skills and accomplishments.

Note: Throughout your resume, avoid using pronouns

CORE COMPETENCIES

Hiring managers love to see accomplishments like these from job applicantsand they love to see hard numbers. If you cant think of any quantifiable accomplishments off the top of your head, try harder! Heres another marketing example:

Note:

Tips For Formatting A College Student Resume

Selecting the right font and font size ensures your resume looks presentable and professional. Stick with simple fonts, such as Calibri, Cambria, Helvetica, or Georgia. For example, you could use Georgia for your name and section headings, and Calibri for the rest of your resume.

Many contend that 12 pt is the ideal font size for the resume body, though if you’re having trouble fitting in some of the text, you may go down to 11 pt. What’s important is that you don’t make your font so small that it’s difficult to read at a glance.

For headings and subtitles, increase the font size about 4-6 pts larger than your body text. For section titles, consider using bolding, underlining, or capitalization to provide even more visual emphasis.

Setting your margins correctly is crucial to presenting an organized and readable resume to potential employers.

Microsoft Word’s default page margins are 1 inch the standard margin size for resumes. If you need a little more room, however, you can move your margins within a range of 0.5-1 inch. For instance, you could drop your top and bottom margins to 0.5 inches and your left and right margins to 0.75 inches.

Making your college student resume easily accessible means aligning your content in an effective manner. In most cases, you’ll left-align the bulk of your resume, including your contact information, as people’s eyes naturally move from left to right when reading in English.

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Graduates Have More Opportunities

First, unlike the graduates of 10 or more years ago, today’s young professionals are entering the real working world with more experience to boost their resumes and impress employers. From internships to co-ops to freelance gigs and even contract work, students are encouraged to secure opportunities throughout their collegiate journey to help explore potential career paths, build their skills, and meet the one to three years’ experience requirements that many entry-level jobs now demand. They’re also more likely to have personal blogs or online portfolios, group projects, volunteer work, leadership programs, and relevant campus activities to boost their resumes without adding any unnecessary fluff.

What Are The Types Of Resumes

There are three main types of resume: chronological, functional, and combination. Additionally, theres the CV, aka the resume on steroids. Most professionals dont need a CV, but academics, scientists, artists, and doctors might. Read more about CVs here. Now, back to the matter at hand:

• A chronological resume lists jobs in reverse-chronological order. For each job, it provides details about the job seekers accomplishments and duties.
• A functional resume provides a list of skills that the job seeker possesses and gives little more than the name of the companies and the candidates job title and, sometimes, the dates.
• The combination resume format is mix of the chronological and functional formats. Most resumes are in a combination format.

The chronological resume provides details about your job history, but can be rather boring. Additionally, a straightforward chronological resume doesnt have a section highlighting an individuals skill sets, which is crucial to getting noticed. A functional resume helps highlight your relevant skills for the job youre applying for. But some hiring managers may find that the functional format hides shortfalls in your work historyand you never want to give an impression that youre hiding something.

Given the weaknesses of both chronological and functional formats, your best bet is the third type of resume format: the combination.

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What Happens To My Rsum When I Submit It Online Anyway

Automated applicant tracking systems are intended to streamline the hiring process, to document applications , and to more effectively screen qualified candidates. Usually, the résumé goes to someone within human resources. People in this role who have experience with the field for which they are recruiting will have a better idea of what theyre looking for. But if one person has to screen résumés for too many departments, he or she will usually rely solely on keywords and may miss things .

Why Your Resume Should Be Two Pages

Your resume will most likely need two pages to show your career progression. If you have more than 10 years of experience, youâll also want to include a professional summary and possibly a career highlights section. These are both excellent opportunities to fit in more keywords.

For highly skilled applicants, a two-page resume will also fit all your relevant experience, education, certifications, and additional training.

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When To Take Stuff Off Your Resume

A resume is a living, breathing document. As such, it is subject to change over the course of your career. Sometimes the most difficult work for a writer is editing and updating their own work. The same applies to resumes. When the time comes to update and add new material, you are inevitably faced with the question: When and how do you take the old “stuff” off your resume to make way for the new stuff?

First of all, you need to keep in mind the one-pager-rule for resumes: if you are still in college or seeking your first entry level job, keep your resume to one page. Any longer and your resume will actually be given less time in review, so keep it to one page as the standard. If you have one or two jobs post college, that is when you can decide whether or not to go to a second page. But until then, stick to one page.

So as a college student or recent grad with a one page limit, you should ask yourself the following question about every piece of content: Is this resume worthy? In most cases, you will have about fifty lines to work with on the resume. Think of each line as being worth $1, with a total of $50 to spend. Do you want to spend one of your fifty dollars on this content? Then begin using that same concept for updating and adding new content. Is this new content worth more than the old content which will need to be deleted to make space for it?

How To Write A Resume For Your College Application

Okay, if youve made it to this point then you must be one of those uncommon applicants for whom a resume is either a) required/recommended or b) will add something significant to your application. Here are some tips for writing a meaningful college applicant resume:

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What Should I Do If A Job Board Wont Let Me Present My Rsum The Way I Want It

Some organizations and job boards make job seekers complete a résumé form instead of simply letting them upload a document. This process helps the organization standardize their applicant data to make it simpler to search out qualified candidates. As you review the résumé form, note which fields are optional and decide whether completing them would limit your opportunities. You may choose to leave some fields blank or choose no preference in drop-down menus when it makes sense to do so. Complete skills fields with detailed information and key words, especially relating to computer skills. If given the option, give your résumé an appropriate title highlighting your key skills .

Combine Multiple Related Bullet Points Into One Bullet Point

If you have multiple lines on the same subject within your job experience, you can often combine the statements into one.

Example: Optimize your space by combining functions

• Ensured our marketing had a positive ROI.

• Utilized marketing tools to ensure maximum ROI.

• Managed the marketing team to ensure smooth and efficient projects were deployed.

• Implemented and managed a marketing campaign with extensive A/B testing to achieve a 190% ROI.

The three bullets can easily be grouped together to form a statement thatâs sure to impress an employer. If you have paragraphs, you should turn those into bullet points as well.

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How Often Should I Update My Rsum On Job Boards

Depending on the site or the recruiter using it, freshly updated résumés may get more attention than stale ones, so it makes sense to revisit and revise your résumé regularly. Some people recommend as often as daily, but you probably have more productive things to do . To ensure youre up to date, review and update anything youve posted online at least once or twice a month.

Drafting The Perfect Internship Resume For College

What’s the difference between an internship resume and a college resume?

Before you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, let’s clear a few things:

• Don’t compare your intern resume with a professional who has had years of experience. A simple Google search will give you thousands of resume sample and layouts, and assigning that as a benchmark for yourself will give you nothing but anxiety.

You are still in college. Your experience in the real world is, in all probability, limited. The objective is to showcase that in the best possible way and not instead get drowned out by other internship resumes and give up altogether.

• Recruiters won’t be expecting you to have an extensive professional experience. That’s the major difference between an internship resume and a regular college resume.

Your end goal is the college resume which you’ll finish after graduation. The objective of the internship resume is to pack your final college resume with enough relevant experience that gives you an edge over others.

But even if the internship resume is just a means to an end, it doesn’t mean that you can compromise on the quality of the same.

You can check out our guide to Resume Layouts to get an idea on how to proceed. Our advice: stick to a traditional reverse-chronological format for your college resume.

The Basics

Contact Information

We wouldn’t have included a section on Contact Information for your Internship Resume if we didn’t think it was important.

Education

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What Are Keywords And Action Verbs And How Should I Use Them In My Rsum

Keywords, as the name suggests, are terms that are important to a particular job. Keywords vary by discipline, by company, and by job, so its important to research what sort of terms are key to a particular opportunity. One critical source of information is the job description or posting. Another source is postings of other jobs that are similar to the one youre seeking. You can even go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for insight . Use keywords to describe your experience, skills, and knowledge. Put them in your objective, or in a qualification or skills summary at the top of your résumé, and fit them into the bulleted descriptions of your past jobs. There may also be opportunities to put them into lists of activities and honors.

Action verbs are words that show action. After each bullet on your résumé, start the text with an action verb which gives the reader a quick view into your experiences and lets you succinctly describe what youve accomplished in past positions. If youre describing your work in a current job, your action verbs would be present tense.