You mean I shouldn’t have a two page essay summarizing my entire life? /s

In all seriousness, its unfortunate how many people are mislead by school “career coaches” into making resumes and cover letters filled with fluff.

Here’s some things I remember;

• A paragraph about yourself/goals - waste of space and save that for an interview/cover letter.
• A photo of yourself - you don’t want to add unnecessary bias to the process. (Age, race, gender, sex, etc.)
• your name should be top center, with contact info (email, phone) underneath (use a smaller font than name)
• Address - not needed, you may want to include your town/city if being local is going to be relevant to the employer.
• School classes - to be fair this was probably used in lieu of real jobs so kids could actually fill it out. It is not relevant unless the class is extremely relevant to what the job is and you don’t have other related experiences.
• School GPA - no one cares. For secondary education, state the collage/uni name, your major and minor. Don’t include grad year as this can revel your age.
• Don’t include every job, at a certain point you can leave your two years of retail/fast food behind.
• A giant side boarder - huge waste of space
• references - three. no more, no less. Don’t include on publicly posted resume, such as LinkedIn.
• Family reference - no, unless it’s a family business and that’s all you have.
• multiple pages - no. One page. Reasonable font size (12-14). Vary the font size based on information to help break up blobs if text, A header might be size 16 and bold, while the years worked might be 12, and body text at 14. Dont go less than 10 for anything, and avoid italics, those usually do more harm than good for making it easy to read.
• • be consistent!
• job tile is more important than where you worked.
• Fudging job titles a little bit is oky to match the general industry or be a better description. For example my summer job was working with my school’s IT dept. to do computers and protectors, my official title was “maintenance assistant” - I put “IT assistant” on my resume

Instead of

Bobs Auto Shop

Accountant, 2019-2022

• copy paste the entire job description word for word until you fill the page.

Lead with

Accountant

Bobs Auto Shop, 2019-2022

• Brief description
• applicable buzz words related to the job you are applying too
• Achievements, successes etc. An actual example of something to show you did something useful. This is something that can lead to a longer conversation at an interview. “I created a new process for handling bulk inventory purchasing.” or something, preferably relevant to new job.