By: Vineeth Vaidyula
Today, we had guest speaker Silvana D'Ettorre present a workshop on editing resumes! Not only did we learn about what constituted the perfect resume, including discipline-appropriate headers, font styles, distribution of white space, and chronology, but we also played an online game where we had 6 seconds to look over prospective employees’ resumes to determine whether or not they got an entry-level customer service job. This hands-on experience playing the role of an employer was really eye-opening to say the least-- it got a lot of us thinking about what employers might be looking for right off the bat and, in tandem, about what we should highlight on our resumes to make ourselves more appealing in 6 seconds to get that coveted interview. It was interesting because some of the resumes we judged would have several blocks of text in tiny font that was hard to read, while other resumes would barely have several bullets, making it hard to garner what skills applicants’ had developed from their prior experiences. Sometimes, determining whether or not someone got the job was based on our judgement of the mere professionalism of the resumes (like including a weird selfie or using a red font color was definitely a no-go for us). I also thought it was really insightful to learn why resumes should generally only be a page long! This is due to the fact that because employers have so little time to even look at your application, including two or more pages could cause even your most important experiences and skills that are listed on your first page to be glossed over. I never considered this 1-page recommendation in the past because I thought more meant better, but I learned today that this was not the case. Guess I need to trim my 3-page long resume to 1 page somehow. Oh wait, as Silvana mentioned, I could get help from Career Services, a resource that I didn’t know about until today! And so can you!
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