Many college students want to fill their resumes with valuable experiences that will lead to a steady career. With the recent economic downturn not only impacting liberal arts graduates, but also those in STEM, and especially computer science, the idea of landing a job after graduating is daunting and seemingly impossible. As such, it’s important to have the best resume you can. I learned five tips throughout college to help your resume stand out.
1. Diversify Your Experiences
For students who have a clear idea of what they want to do after graduating or are pursuing careers with specialized training, diversifying work experience may not be as important as those fields will give you the training you need to do your job. For everyone else, diversifying your extracurriculars can give you an advantage in the job search. In addition to having a well-rounded resume, pursuing different opportunities and fields shows that you can thrive in a new or unfamiliar environment and that your skills are transferable to various work environments.
2. Seek Out Leadership Opportunities
Leadership skills are highly sought in the job market as you will often be required to collaborate with others and come up with ideas on the spot. Additionally, it shows that you can take initiative and lead a team to complete your initiatives. In addition to looking great on a resume, leadership positions do build character. My time in student government helped me to grow in many ways I would have never imagined and helped me to develop my work mindset. However, it’s important to keep in mind that with leadership positions, comes a lot of time and responsibility dedicated to it. Make sure to balance your leadership position and classwork to ensure you can make the most out of your leadership position.
3. Have a Polished, Simple, Looking Resume
One of the most repeated pieces of advice I got regarding crafting my resume is to make sure it’s simple. Many websites and word-processing programs may offer resumes with many colors, unique formats, and headshots, but employers do not like these types of resumes. Business is all about getting straight to the point and presenting information in a palatable, but simplistic manner, and fancy resumes do the exact opposite. Your seventh-grade history teacher might have thought it was amusing and cool to put fancy fonts, over-the-top slide transitions, and minion memes in their PowerPoint presentation about Ancient Egypt, but your manager will find it not only unprofessional but also annoying (and frankly, I found it annoying at age 12.) So do yourself and the recruiter a favor and apply to that job with a polished, clean-looking resume. This website offers free resume templates to download and can help you craft your new resume!
4. Keep Your Resume’s Format Consistent
In addition to having a clean-looking resume, it’s also important for your resume to look consistent. It’s generally advised not to have more than three to four bullet points for each of your experiences. It could imply to employers that some positions were more important than others (and you want to show that all your positions are equally important!) In addition, make sure your resume does not exceed more than one to two pages. This is different from a CV, which has three or more pages and includes your professional work experience and academic history and is academia’s version of a resume.
5. Make a LinkedIn Account If You Haven’t Already
If you are someone who just doesn’t like social media, you should still have a LinkedIn account. Not only is LinkedIn the Instagram of the professional world, but it is also an amazing networking tool that, if you know how to use it, can lead to job opportunities. With resumes being limited to 1-2 pages, LinkedIn allows you to showcase all your work experience and is a great supplement for your resume. While LinkedIn can’t guarantee you’ll land a job opportunity, it can give you the edge in networking, which can help you secure that dream job!
The job search process is a tedious, repetitive process that often results in rejections, especially during a recession. Many people will often apply to 100+ jobs before they get an offer, while others may have to travel long distances to work. It’s important to remember that a job rejection does not mean that you aren’t capable or qualified, it just means that the recruiter was looking for something else. Additionally, there are many factors like budget cuts, internal hiring, or nepotism that led to open positions suddenly being filled. It’s important to not let the job search and rejections get you down and to keep your chin up! So, keep applying! You will have more chances of landing a job the more jobs you apply to.