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1. How to avoid age discrimination
While an unpleasant truth, age discrimination is quite common in the job market. Even a mature candidate with a wealth of experience can often be subjected to feelings of being sidelined and unwanted. However, if certain factors are kept in mind while crafting your resume, this obstacle can be dealt with effectively.
- Firstly, while stating your work experience, do not tab the dates of tenure. Mention the dates along with the positions held, and place this below the name of the company or the firm. By doing this, the dates will be downplayed.
- Secondly, do not mention experience which goes back to something like 35 years. Doing this will immediately raise an alarm. At the most you need to mention the most recently held positions and can state the last 10 to 15 years of experience.
- Another thing which you should not overlook is the graduation dates. With so much of experience to showcase, you can safely leave out the dates here, and keep the education section towards the end of the resume.
- Again, you need to be careful about including dates alongside professional affiliations. If certain memberships date decades back or have expired, do not include them on your resume.
- Lastly, and most importantly, NEVER begin your resume with a profile section which says, ‘Highly accomplished professional with 40 years of experience in...' Instead, use words such as extensive, broad, wide, or anything on those lines.
2. Categorize your information
One of the best ways to create a winning resume is to intelligently organize your information. The content of your resume is by far the most important factor that will ultimately get you to the interview and a good amount of time must be dedicated to its presentation. Instead of having a page full of valuable credentials all crammed together, it would do you a lot of good to have separate sections that would not only highlight every aspect of your growth through the years, but would also break the monotony and enhance readability. Your resume could be divided as follows:
- Profile or Summary of Qualifications
- Areas of Expertise
- Key Accomplishments or Career Highlights
- Work Experience
- Education
- Publications
- Presentations
- Language and Computer Skills
3. The length of your resume
The length that you give to your resume will be one of the leading factors that will determine whether or not your resume is skimmed through within the few minutes which the recruiter will dedicate to it. You need to make sure that that it is not too long or too short. Remember the following rules:
- Too much of content: Should you have too much of material to include in your resume, then you must skim through all that you have as your credentials and include only those which are most recent and most relevant to the current job search. Make sure that you do not go beyond two pages and divide your information into categories as well as have them in a combination of paragraph and bullet form. This will help to sort out information and enhance readability. Also, have a relatively small font (but one that is legible!), and set your page borders in a way that more information fits in.
- Too little of information: If you have too little to mention in terms of experience or academic credentials, then it is most obvious that the length of your resume will not be more than a single page. However, in order to downplay the fact that too little has been done, increase the page borders, have a larger font size, and use a font that is more ‘filling'. For instance, you could use Book Antiqua or Palatino Linotype. This will help in spreading the information and decrease white space.
Care and attention given to the writing of your resume will go a long way to bring success in your job search. Keep visiting our website and we will be back with more resume writing tips every week. We would appreciate your feedback and any suggestions which you could provide on feedback@preferredresumes.com
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