How to Prepare Your Resume

A resume is your first impression to a potential employer, it should be professional, concise, and 100% error free. Many times the initial review of your resume will be conducted by a Human Resources employee who may be checking for nothing more than proper spelling and certain keywords. Don't let your resume get tossed in the trash in the first level of review. Keep in mind e a few things when crafting your resume to get it to the desk of the decision maker and make a good fist impression.

- Keep it simple. The general rule of thumb for resumes is one page for every ten years of experience. If yours is longer than this, seriously consider paring back some of the extraneous information and boiling down to the essentials. If your resume is shorter than this, try to beef it up with more pertinent eye catching information. Remember that the purpose of the resume is to get you an interview, so there's no need to put your entire career on the resume, save something to tell the interviewer in person.

- Keeping it simple also pertains to formatting. Keep the formatting clean, and simple, avoid complicated bullets and outline schemes. Keep in mind that the employer may save it using a newer version of Word, or another word processing software and all your formatting could be lost.

- Be proud of your accomplishments and don't be afraid to embellish a bit, but realize that there's a fine line between embellishing and lying. Were you the only Accounts Payable Processor in the Accounting Department? There's nothing wrong with putting the job title "Lead Accounts Payable Processor", but "Accounts Payable Supervisor" might be a stretch. There's nothing wrong with embellishing, but lying will submarine your chances of getting a job faster than you can imagine.

- Proofread, proofread, and then proofread again. Nothing will eradicate your chances of landing an interview than spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, or incorrect information. Proofread your resume repeatedly over the course of several weeks so that you can keep taking an objective, fresh look at it.