It’s not the fault of the authors, I guess. You can’t put out a physical book with only a few pages in it. Books require you to have hundreds of pages, so the authors end up having to come up with a bunch of filler to make the manuscript substantial enough to merit printing (and to justify the $19.95 cover price).

That’s why I loved the blog format. I could serve out real, tangible tips and job search hacks.  Want to know how to handle a tough interview question like: “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” Bam! I could give you my best advice in an easily digestible couple hundred words.

When I stumbled upon this domain, I realized it would be the perfect vehicle to finally do my resume writing book the way I wanted to do it: simple, no nonsense, no BS, to the point.

Sure, the page count on this “book” might not make it to the hundreds, but then again, I’m really only interested in focusing on what you’re really looking for: the real, bare bones, real world advice you need. No filler.

My goal with this book is simple: I want to take you line-by-line through the process of writing a resume.

Hopefully, you should be able to leave this browser window open on the computer, open up a Word file, and then with the two windows side by side, you can click through this guide and I’ll tell you: “First you do this. Now you do this. Now you do this.”

Within an hour or two, you should have your resume completed, and I’ll have led you through the entire process.

If you want more elaborate dissertations about what resumes are, and how they came to be, and tons of footnotes and filler – fine! There are other resume books out there.

But this one will simply tell you what you need to do to write your resume.

I hope you’ll find it helpful.

-Brian McCullough

Quite simply, I’ve been doing this all my life. I founded ResumeWriters.com in the late 90s. Over the last 15 years, that website has evolved into the largest and most respected resume writing company in the world. A few years ago, I was a consultant for the founding of ResumeService.com. I’d like to think that, in many ways, ResumeService.com is continuing the ResumeWriters.com legacy. I’ve been around the world speaking and giving resume writing seminars to job seekers of every stripe. I’ve been a nationally syndicated career advice newspaper columnist. I’ve been interviewed by venues ranging from CNBC to Time Magazine. My personal blog, TheJobBored.com, has become a leading career advice community, with tens of thousands of readers visiting every week. Most importantly, the number of resumes I’ve personally written over the years is quite literally in the thousands.

After doing this for almost two decades, the companies I’ve founded, the writers I’ve worked with, and the projects I’ve been involved with have helped hundreds of thousands of people find new jobs.

Resumes aren’t magical things. They’re simply things we write to get noticed and get hired. But there are some best-practices to writing resumes. And there are some generally accepted rules. And there are some techniques that work better than others. My hope is that my years of experience crafting resumes will help you in your immediate goal: finding a job. Again, the point of this guide is to walk you through all these issues step-by-step, so that by the end, you’ve done things right.

And you’ll have a resume that will get you a new job.

It’s not an insignificant issue.

First of all, you want your resume to be legible. And you want your resume to be legible (easily readable) not just for human eyes, but also for computer eyes… in case your resume might be scanned into a database. You want your resume to be legible if faxed, scanned, transmitted, emailed as a photo attachment, etc.

But secondly, and just as important, the font you chose can communicate a lot about your professionalism and intentions. If you’re an accountant, you want to stick with normal, conventional “professional” fonts. But if you’re a graphic designer, you want to and probably need to be a little more adventurous in your font choice.

So what are the fonts I would recommend using for most professions in most cases?

Your choices are basically between traditional serif fonts (Times New Roman) and sans serif fonts (Arial, Helvetica, etc). Here are the fonts I’d feel most comfortable using:

TIMES NEW ROMAN-

I’d say this is the safest bet for most people. It’s the most common professional font for a reason. It’s highly legible and professional looking. The downside: you risk looking just like everyone else.

CENTURY OLD STYLE-

A good font to use for very traditional or “stuffy” jobs.

VERDANA-

ARIAL-

Veranda and Arial are both excellent Helvetica substitutes. Highly legible and familiar to most people.

TAHOMA-

Another common and legible choice.

COURIER NEW-

An excellent and very common font, but I find that it looks too much like an old type writer font (which it’s intended to do) and… this is just a personal preference… I feel like that makes a resume look a bit dated.

Here’s a list of fonts I found on a resume template website. This is a good list that I’d stick to pretty much exclusively.

In the end, resume font choice can be a personal decision. Go with what looks best and makes you feel the most confident and professional. But don’t go too far afield. Unusual or showy fonts can make your resume stand out in a bad way.

Read the rest of my NO BS Guide To Resume Writing, starting with chapter one.

Yes. You’re right. I think that most people should engage a resume writing service to write their resume for them. A resume is a marketing document. When companies need to market themselves, they don’t create the advertisements themselves. They hire professional ad-men to help them out: to get the wording right; to organize their message in the most effective way. When you go to sell your house, you don’t try to do it yourself. Of course you can, but most people hire a professional to market their house for them: to understand what works in the market right now; to market everything effectively.

There are certain times in life when you should just hiring a professional to help you. I think you increase your odds of success that way. I think job-seekers should do the same when it comes to resume writing.

Hiring professional resume writers to do things right the first time can increase your chances of getting an interview by orders of magnitude versus doing it yourself. Resume professionals do this day in and day out. They know what works and what doesn’t. They know what works now, as opposed to what used to work. They know – even on a week-to-week basis sometimes – what employers are looking for versus what turns them off. And resume writers often specialize in specific career fields. So they know exactly how a pharmaceutical sales resume should look. Do you?

But hey. Some people are DIY (do-it-yourself) types.

I get that. So this guidebook is for you, if you think you can do it yourself.

You can.

You’d be better off getting some professional help (much, much better off) but if you want to take a crack at it, I’ll show you step-by-step how to do it.

Let me take one last stab at convincing you why you’re better off getting help, and then we’ll get to the good stuff:

1. Some people can’t write. That’s just the truth. At ResumeWriters.com and ResumeService.com, they see people from all walks of life. Some of their clients are C-level executives at major Fortune 500 companies. And yet, they’re not the best at putting pen to paper. And they know it. So professional resume writers craft resumes for even the captains of industry.
2. A resume writing professional is on the ground every day doing this. They know what works and what doesn’t. Who knows better what works and what doesn’t when it comes to landing interviews: Someone who does this for a living and works with dozens of clients every week and knows what is getting results? Or you, who doesn’t write resumes for a living?
3. A professional resume writer’s number one skill is organizing jobseeker information and selling it in the most efficient and effective way possible. They have the impartiality to tell the jobseeker what is important and what isn’t, what can help sell skills and what doesn’t. Is that your number one skill?
4. Finally, a resume writer is an impartial 3^rd party that can help jobseekers separate the wheat from the chaff, for the reasons outlined above.

My bet is that even when you get to the end of this book and I’ve shown you the right way to write a resume, you’ll realize that you can still benefit from having a professional resume writer give you a polish. Even if you don’t engage the services of one of the companies I’ve worked with and can vouch for, then please, at least go to The Professional Association of Resume Writers (http://www.parw.com/) and look up a professional in your town and have them give you a hand.

And even if you don’t pay a professional, let me take the time here to say: for God’s sake, have someone else take a look at your resume before you send it out. Not just for editing purposes, but for perspective.

Look, we’re all married to our accomplishments. In a way, we’re all too close to ourselves to write about ourselves.

Let someone else look and what you’ve written and tell you what’s truly important about your career and what isn’t. A resume isn’t just a list of everything you’ve done. It’s more about the-important-things-you’ve-done-that-will-convince-somone-to-hire-you. Sometimes, the most important things on a resume are the things you leave out.

But we’ll get to that.

In fact, let’s get to that with the next post…

And guess what? ONLY that stuff. Nothing else.

Think of it from the hiring manager’s perspective. They have a problem: they have a job opening to fill. You need your resume to convince them that interviewing (and hopefully hiring) you would be the solution to that problem.

Your resume has to be just right. You only want to put in the stuff that will do the convincing. You don’t want to put in everything you’ve ever done. You don’t want to write your whole autobiography. You only want to put in the stuff that is applicable to the specific job you are applying for.

This means your resume will change from time to time. It can change depending on the job you’re applying for. You add things when applying for one position that you would leave out for another.

It will even mean that sometimes you’ll leave out stuff that is super impressive to you and others. Heck, you might even leave out stuff that you feel is the most important work you’ve ever done in your career.

It all depends.

If you’ve been sending out the exact same resume to every job you’ve been applying to (without tweaking it at least a little bit to suit each job) then you’ve been doing it wrong.

In a couple of posts here, we’re going to sit down and begin writing your baseline resume.

But then, when we’re done, and the time comes actually send this resume out to job openings, you’re going to need to always be willing to tweak it to make it most effective for each individual job. This can mean leaving things out, adding things in, emphasizing this thing for one job, but emphasizing that other thing for a different job.

Why are we doing this?

Because as I said at the beginning, you want your resume to convince the hiring manager you’re the solution to their problem. And not just a generic problem either! You’re solution to this one specific problem that they’ve advertised for with their job opening.

So, first things first:

The job ad is where the hiring manager is telling you what his problem is. The job ad is all the information you’re going to get to work with… but it’s also all the information you need. The job ad is where the hiring manager is saying, “My problems are 1, 2 and 3.”

This allows you to tailor your resume to convince the hiring manager that, “I am your solution A (because of this) and B (because of that) and C (because of this other thing).” And if you’re really doing things right, your resume will also say, “Oh, and by the way, I can also be a solution to problems D, E and F! I can not only solve the problem you’ve got right now, but if you hire me, I can provide solutions to problems you don’t even know about! I’m just that good.”

The best way to get hired is to solve the hiring manager’s problem. An even better way is to solve all their problems. Make it look like hiring you would be a gift that keeps on giving.

So study that job ad or job opening. Understand exactly what they’re looking for. And then tailor your resume to answering that exact job ad.

As I said, we’re going to write your baseline resume here in a minute. But you can always tweak it based on the job ad in question. And you should always do that.

You’re looking to solve their problem and your resume is your marketing document that catches their eye and shows them you’re the solution.

Trust me.

I don’t know why it is, but a certain segment of the population holds fast to the notion that a resume must be one page and one page only. This is simply not true. Of the hundreds of resumes ResumeWriters.com produces in a given week, I would say more than half are 2-pagers. Some are 3-pagers.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen people try to cram an entire career history onto one page for no good reason. Very often, they’re leaving important things out of their career history just because of some arbitrary sense of space.

So, let me say it once and for all: a resume does not have to be one page. There’s nothing wrong with a one-page resume, of course. If that’s what you’ve got, then that’s what you’ve got. Students especially, and young professionals in general (those who don’t have a lot of experience to speak of) should probably stick to 1-pagers. But if you have the career history to list, then don’t sweat going to two pages. Don’t even worry if it’s one and a half pages… or even 1 page with only a paragraph or two spilling out into the second page. Go ahead and keep that second page. It’s better than leaving something off your resume that might be helpful.

So the answer to the question “how many pages should a resume be” is: as many pages as necessary. As many as are required to sell you as a professional. You probably should stick to 1-2 pages… 3 pages on occasion, but never more than that.

I have much more to say on this matter in my famous blog post: Busting The One-Page Resume Myth over at TheJobBored.

Having said that, I should take a moment here to describe a different kind of document that can be many pages indeed: the CV.

A CV (aka, Curriculum Vitae) is what people call resumes in Europe. The formatting is different, as is the information you would provide. If you’re looking for a job in Europe, the employer will ask to see your CV. They might not even know what a resume is, because that’s very much a North American style document.

A CV is a more detailed, complex document than a traditional resume. Standard practice for a resume is to list your career history, your professional skills and your career accomplishments. And that’s mostly it (depending on the career field).

A CV includes all of the above, but goes into far greater detail, outlining each and every thing you have done, down to the individual project, paper or professional association. Whereas North American resumes focus on job descriptions, CVs tend to de-emphasize this part and focus more on listing instead of describing what you’ve done. A CV puts a much heavier emphasis on educational and academic backgrounds as well as teaching and research experience, publications, presentations, awards, honors, affiliations and the like. A CV can also encompass personal items about yourself that are considered too superfluous to be included in a resume.

In short, a CV is your job history and your life history. A resume tends to focus primarily on your job history. Whereas I just told you that a resume is usually 1-3 pages, in contrast, a CV can run to 5-6 pages easily.

So, CVs are not often used in the US… unless you have a very specific career. If you are an American, chances are you will only ever need to present an American Style resume. The only rare cases that might need a CV: If you’re an academic, researcher or scientist. CVs are also sometimes called for in the Higher Education and Legal fields.

We’re going to be dealing with your standard, American-Style resume.

I’m going to show you a resume format that is a bit of a hybrid between the two. Let’s call what we’re about to write a Combination Resume format.

But just so you understand, let me briefly touch on the two formats and what they entail.

In a functional resume, you de-emphasize your career chronology. Sure, you list your jobs and employers and dates and all of that. But you put more emphasis on other things. A functional resume might have sections like: Skills, Accomplishments, even Core Competencies. And it might have several of them. These would be given precedence over the career history. With a functional resume the idea is that your jobs and titles aren’t as important as giving an overall impression of who you are as a professional.

Functional resumes are often utilized by students and people who don’t have much of a career history and thus need to show they’re well rounded without being able to point to a long career. But they’re also used by some executives.

A chronological resume is where you basically lay out your career history, job by job, usually going in reverse chronological order, with the most recent job listed first and the earliest (or least impressive) jobs listed toward the end. The idea behind a chronological resume is to show your career progression as a sort of narrative, emphasizing increasing skills, experience and accomplishments.

As I said, the resume we’re going to sit down to write in a few posts will be a bit of both. But let me show you a functional resume and a chronological resume example so you know what I’m talking about:

A Functional Resume Format

This is a functional resume format. Notice the qualifications and career highlights are broken out as separate bulleted lists. The career history is still there, in reverse chronological order, but the details of each job are de-emphasized. In fact, each job only gets a couple of bullets of description. This is because the emphasis is on the overall scope of experience, not the jobs in particular.

A Chronological Resume Format

This is a chronological resume format. Notice that the career history is outlined in reverse chronological order, with the most recent job first. The vast majority of this resume is the career history, in greater detail.

What is the best paper to use when mailing a resume as part of a job application?

I guess this goes along with my post concerning the best font to use for your resume.

I actually have a very specific answer to this question.

For more than a decade now, we’ve been printing hard copies of people’s resumes as an add-on feature to ourresume writing service.

And in all that time, we’ve used the same paper.

I’ll tell you all about it, but first, let me make clear: I’m not getting paid or receiving any other consideration for the endorsement I’m about to make.

Having said that, in the resume writing industry, Southworth is the only paper brand most of us use. You can find a wide range of Southworth paper products at most of the “big box” office supply retailers like Staples or Office Depot.

The specific type of paper I recommend using is Southworth Business Paper, 32lb, 100% Cotton, 8 1/2″x11″ and WHITE.

Here’s why:

• It’s simply the best paper. It’s thick and hearty enough to feel and look professional, but it’s still easily used in most printers. The paper is clear and the texture makes the text legible.
• 24lb paper is “ok” in my opinion, but a little on the light side. It feels too much like high quality laser printer paper. I prefer something that feelshigher class. And 32lb does that.
• Southworth sells paper that they specifically brand as “resume paper” but I prefer the business paper just because of the look and feel. You’ll do fine with the resume paper, but aim for 32 lb if you can.
• I don’t like the linen paper. It’s too grainy and a bit to “showy” for me. The cotton paper has the heft and the texture without the visible grain.
• I always and only recommend going with white paper. The ivory is too much like a college diploma, and to me that reads as a bit to formal.
• At ResumeWriters.com, we buy paper by the boxful, but if you look around, or order online, you can get the paper I’m describing in smaller boxes of a few dozen sheets.
• You WILL have to pay more, but you’re paying for quality.
• If you’re paying for this sort of paper, you owe it to yourself to print your resume using a laser printer. Trust me, it will just look better.

But first, let’s be clear. What we are going to be putting together is the main resume. The resume you will print out and take to the interview.

There are other ways to send in a resume, of course. You can email it. You can cut and paste it into online forms on Monster or whatever. But all these different types of resumes will be based off your main resume. At some point in the process, you will be sitting down with a real person for a real interview, and you will want to hand the hiring manager a real, tangible piece of paper. This is what we will be working on.

We’ll get to the other submission formats at the end of this guide. But for now, we are working on the main, master copy of your resume that everything you do will be based on.

So, if you’re ready, fire up good old Microsoft Word and let’s get started…