My son sent me an email asking for my advice on writing a good resume. He’s off at college and wants to go get a part-time job. I’ve been hiring people since I was a teenager and was promoted to classified supervisor at the newspaper where I worked. In the 30 years since, I’ve made some mistakes, but I like to think I’ve learned not to repeat them. Here’s what I told him:

I do read cover letters. Yes, I filter out people who make spelling errors and grammatical errors and punctuation errors. (Anyone who confuses it’s and its, your and you’re, and to and too, is definitely out.) If it’s not relevant, fine, but in almost anything I’m hiring for, it’s relevant. (The exception being visual artists.) Even if it isn’t precisely relevant, I don’t like seeing these mistakes on the page. It hurts my eye. If I had to see it every day from someone I was paying, I would start to feel culpable.
So:  Once someone has passed my close reading of his or her spelling and grammar, I’m looking for relevant skills and character. Character is important; you can teach skills, but you can’t teach character. Both the cover letter and the resume should make character statements. And the resume should list relevant skills.

Beyond that, I don’t think there’s any mysticism at work here. Look at sample resumes and adapt accordingly. A good opening line on a cover letter will almost assuredly help you jump to the top of the pile.

Good luck.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.