Resume Writing Written by Gautam Ravi

I want to share my experiences on what a good resume looks like and provide some steps on making your resume stand-out from your peers. The first person who will be seeing your resume when you apply to any job/posting is the recruiter. It is generally said that it takes a minimum of 6 seconds for the recruiter to reject your resume. Well, you must be surprised seeing this!!! But yes, the job market in USA and especially California is really competitive. Unless you market yourself consciously and correctly, it is difficult to get noticed. Keep the following things in mind that I have learned while drafting your resume:

1. Do not put your photo on your resume. This distracts the viewer and the focus goes on assessing the person in the photo rather than looking on the qualifications and achievements.
2. Keep your resume for strictly one page. As mentioned before, your Resume needs to be noticed in a really short span of time. Extending the number of pages won’t do any good.
3. Mention the skill-set/technologies explicitly on your resume. Every job position has a certain qualification, required and preferred skills. The recruiter is not a complete technical person but can come to know if your skill-set matches with the position applied and hence make the first screening.
4. Keep the description of your projects brief and maintain the language in such a way that it is easily understandable. Give some interesting/unique aspect in each project you put on your Resume which will make you stand out.
5. Make no grammatical/spelling errors in your resume. This will give a clear idea that you have not taken efforts to proofread your resume.
6. Keep the chronology correct in your resume. Don’t give a feel to the viewer that your timeline is not according to your proposed interest.
7. Always mention the email address which you most actively use on your resume. Otherwise, you can create a separate email id for job search and consolidate the mails in that one.
8. In case you have more than 4 projects and can’t fit them in a single page by spacing them out horizontally, create a vertical partition (LaTex format) which will give you more space to mention them.
9. Do not plagiarize or put projects you have not done in your resume. It will lead you to negative consequences and you might end up spoiling your relationship with the company.
10. Use proper alignment and bullets to explain your work better. This also gives a professional feel to the resume.

Gautam Ravi Home Country: India The Henry Samueli School of Engineering Computer Engineering, M.S.