The Ten Commandments of Resumes
Your resume is the single most important document you will use when you’re looking for a job. Far more than your cover letter (which – despite the name – almost every recruiter reads last, if at all), it is your resume that will determine whether you’ll be invited to interview. Given its importance, I’ll be spending more time here talking in detail about various parts of your resume. But as an introduction, I’m here today to share ’10 Commandments’ of resume writing. The things you must and must not do, if you want me to consider taking the time to interview you.
DO: Make it easy to contact you.
Name, phone number, and email. If you want to include your mailing address you can, but if a recruiter is going to be replying to you by email that’s not necessary anymore. Pro tip: if your email address and outgoing voicemail messages don’t sound professional, fix that.
get this out of the way first: I hate trick questions. In all cases, but particularly in interviews. I don’t like them, I don’t ask them, and I don’t like it when people ask them of me. I have a strongly-held belief that an interview should be an honest, professional conversation between two people, with the intent of determining whether a given job could be a good fit for the person. Trick questions turn that into a sort of game, and it’s the worst kind of game because only one of the players knows the rules.