Vitor Rodrigues

• Focus on specifics – do not build a generic resume that you send with all of your jobs applications. You need to tailor your resume to the target positions you are looking for and refine it for each single application. When applying for a job, read the job description wisely and identify the skills that you have and match the job description and make sure you point out those skills in your resume, either based on professional experience, education or personal projects. Try to identify uncommon or rare skills required for the job that you have. HR staff will filter applications based on the candidates skills and if you are one in a few that has the skill X, then it is more likely for you to be selected from the pool of candidates.
• Stick to one page - never write long resumes. Having reviewed and filtered quite a few resumes myself, long resumes usually contain lots of irrelevant information about the candidate and his/her proficiency for the job. And when someone has to read dozens of resumes, a long resume is a serious candidate to be excluded. Writing a one page resume is also considered to be your first test during your application. Similarly to those TV contests where you have 30 seconds to answer a question and the best answer is chosen by the public or the juri, when you apply for a job you should consider that you have one page where you can write the reasons why you are the best person for the job. These reasons can be your past experience or education or just your motivation and passion for the job, as long as you can write it down in a way that will convince the hiring staff to give you an interview opportunity.
• Misspellings are a no-no – just like the one page rule, avoid misspellings is also a golden rule regarding resumes. Your resume is your entry card to the job interview and, as such, it must be perfect. When hiring staff is evaluating your resume, they are evaluating you! Don’t make them think that you are not perfect and didn’t work hard enough in your application. Even if you are sure about the correctness of your resume, ask someone with more experience than you in the resume’s language to review it. Sometimes they can give you very good input on how to re-write one or another sentence to have a much better impact when the hiring staff reads your resume.
  

Since I’ve moved to Silicon Valley to do my internship at IBM that I’ve received many emails asking for opinions, internship/job openings or just to ask opinion about a resume. I’ve always found problems with the topics above, and always tried to help people correct them, even if sometimes people doesn’t accept my comments very well or simply rejects them. Here are the common issues:

• Focus on specifics – I would say that about 80-90% of the resumes I receive are from Portugal. Sometimes, I receive 2 or 3 from the same University at the same time. Unfortunately, all the three look the same except for the applicant’s name. Most of the times, the resume I receive is just a list of all the classrooms the student attended during the degree, and sometimes even a detailed list of high-school education is present. First, these resumes are generic resumes. They are not targeted to a specific job or to a specific area, so people tend to build them as much generic as they can be. This is not good. When I receive this types of resumes, there is nothing I can use to distinguish from one candidate to the other. Remember, your resume represents you! Your resume must show why you are better than the other candidates. Instead of just listing the classrooms you attended, focus on your projects. Describe the projects you executed during your degree in such way that these descriptions will prove your expertise in the technology used and also your teamwork  and organizational skills. Focus on table stakes you achieved in your projects.
• Stick to one page – 100% of the resumes I’m receiving for the first time break this rule. I must confess that I also broke this rule when I first applied for a position in the US. My first resume had almost 2 pages, and I considered it to be pretty small. I was wrong. Most of the times, this rule is broken because people does not focus on specifics. In the same way that we need to tailor a resume to each job opportunity, we also need to tailor it to each market that we are applying to. Europe and US have different perspectives of what a resume’s size should be. If in Europe there is the European CV template that will easily expand to 2 or 3 pages just by filling in the common fields, in US the “standard” resume is one page long. You should always do some research on the market that you are applying to, and look for some sample or template resumes for that market. This difference in standards can be a minor difference if you know how to summarize the information in your resume and keep just the important stuff. For example, in the US style resume the applicant’s name and address occupies the first 2 lines only, while on the European model it can take up a considerable amount of space in the first page. As long as there is no fill-up unnecessary text in your resume, having more than one page can be acceptable. What is not acceptable is to add redundant information just to have a bigger resume. The worst example of redundant information I have received so far was a resume that contained the applicant’s parents name, address and cellphone number. I never understood the purpose of that information.
• Misspellings are a no-no – with today’s technology, misspelling errors are definitely a no. There are spell-checkers and online dictionaries everywhere, and you should review your resume quite a few times to confirm accuracy before emailing it. Also, if you don’t know the correct word in the language you are writing the resume, ask someone that may know it, or rewrite your text to avoid the need of that word. Never, never, never create a new english word that only you know! If a typo can be acceptable, adding an english termination to a portuguese word is not acceptable at all. As for the typos, just make sure you review your resume one more time before you email it, although most spell-checkers should be able to catch them.

This post is already quite long, so I will leave some other topics and examples for a upcoming post. Just as a summary, your resume is your representative in the pool selection phase, so if you want to be selected for an interview, you need to stand out (for the best reasons ). Also, when applying directly to someone’s email, please write a cover letter. Generally you can also doing it when applying though HR websites, but HR screening people won’t read before selecting the resumes.