Feel-Good Resumes

    Happy March, everyone! Spring is coming, and if you're in university like me, another school year is rapidly approaching its end. And if you're in your last year of study (also like me), then graduation is just around the corner and you might be thinking (again, just like I am): What the heck do I do now?

    For me, plan A was to be accepted to a medical school, and have the summer off to go on some of the adventures my wife and I have been dreaming about before school in September. But that didn't happen. And my plan B was, well, underdeveloped at best. I knew I would go find work, until I do get into a medical school, but I never bothered to think about where, or what kind of job I'd get.

    But! No matter what I end up doing, one thing has to come first: I have to write a resume.

    No matter where you are in life, or what pathway you chose to pursue after high school, there will come a time when you'll look for a job, and this almost always means that you'll need to write a resume. Not only that, but you need to write one that will catch an employers eye, and it needs to be impressive enough to stand out from maybe dozens of other resumes, but somehow short enough that the employers reading it can take it all in over the 7 seconds they'll spend reading it. Yeah, that's how long an employer will spend reading your resume, on average.

    Sounds hard, right? You're probably right. But there's also a lot of help out there if you look for it. Google can be a real friend here. Chances are, too, that your government has a resource centre in your town, or at least nearby with professionals ready to help you draft your resume and find jobs. If you're in university or college, there's probably resources there to help you along, too. But the important thing to remember is that writing a resume should make you feel good. I'll explain why in a bit, but let's start with some other tips, first:

Keep it short:
    Two pages is plenty. Any more than that, and you risk employers not reading the whole thing. 7 seconds, remember? Look at examples online, and you'll see that most resumes look like lists. That format will help you keep your resume short, and you should use it.

Adapt it to the job posting:
    One clever way to make your resume stand out is if you emphasize the right things. For example, I just applied to a job to a fitness centre a few days ago, and the posting for it mentioned that one of the key responsibilities would be pushing sales. So, even though I'm about to get a shiny new degree in human kinetics (which is mostly health and exercise science), I emphasized my previous experience in sales as much, if not more, than my education.
    Another way you can adapt your resume to the job posting is by researching the company that posted it. Doing this will give you a better idea of what the company does, and what kind of work you'll be doing.
   If you adapt your resume to job postings, you might end up writing a few different versions of it. If you're applying to a lot of really similar jobs (like fast food jobs for the summer, for example), you probably don't need different resumes for Wendy's and McDonald's. Unless you want to. I wouldn't stop you.

Write your achievements, not your tasks:
    This is probably the best resume advice I ever found (thank you, UBC!), and this is what I meant when I said writing a resume should make you feel good. Most people, when they write about their previous experience, only write the tasks they had to do at previous jobs: "cooked food"; "sold cars"; "built houses". That's boring, and it doesn't sound impressive, even if it was actually impressive.
    Compare the car selling example to this one: "organized regular marketing campaigns to sell an average of twenty cars per month." I don't know if that's a realistic example, but it sounds more impressive, right? Not only does the employer know more about what you did, but they also know how well you did it. So what's different? UBC calls these "accomplishment statements", and they follow the basic formula: VERB+TASK+RESULT. Start with the verb of what you did, then describe your task and end with a result, remember to keep it short. Basically, if you're doing this right, you should feel better about yourself because you're writing down things you've achieved. It's pretty much a feel-good-Friday about yourself, and it goes a long way in making resume-writing a lot easier and less scary, and it makes your resume look a lot better.
    Check out this UBC webpage for more examples: https://students.ubc.ca/career/career-resources/resumes-cover-letters-curricula-vitae


   There's a lot more to resume writing. What are some tips and tricks that helped you write your resume?