Professional Resume Advice and Sample ... - Career Services

To ensure that your resume passes the readability test, ask yourself thesecritical questions:1. Can someone glance at my resume and instantly know“who” I am?2. Is there plenty of white space on my resume to break up thetext into short sections that are easy to read?3. Have I limited my paragraphs to no more than four to six lines?4. Have I limited my lists of bullet points to no more than fourto six items? If not, have I separated the bullets with whitespace and/or used headings to create clusters of bulletsaround certain skills, functions, projects, or achievements?5. Have I used a font that is pleasing to the eye and largeenough to be easily read?6. Have I effectively used type enhancement such as bold,italics, underlining, and capitalization to highlight the mostimportant information about myself and my career?Is myreasonable an appropriate length – most likely one or twopages? (Exceptions to this resume guideline are rare, so ifyour resume is three pages or more, are you truly certainthat all of the information you’ve included is critical?)7. Have I included both a summary section and a corecompetencies section?8. Can someone easily peruse my resume in five to 10 seconds andcapture the most critical information about me and my career?CHAPTER 5 : Designing the Professional’s Resume136