HRcareers

Writing A Resume

• Style
• Introduce yourself
• Professional experience
• Formal education
• Professional development
• Hobbies and interests
• Referees
• Proof read!

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Style
A clean and simple style is best. Use a common font, like Arial or Times New Roman and keep the text between 10 and 12pts. If you use a table format to help you lay things out, take out the gridlines.
Convention dictates no more than two or three pages for a CV.

Introduce yourself
First thing on the top of page one: name and contact details. If you have any commonly recognised post-nominal letters that are relevant to the job you’re applying for, (eg CAHRI), then by all means use them.
Next, many people chose to include a career profile, no more than two or three lines, which summarises their key skills and experience to date. This can be thought of as your shop window. For example:
“I am a professionally-qualified human resources manager with five years’ experience of managing teams and ten years total HR experience, gained in generalist and internal communication roles with blue chip FMCG corporations.”
Whatever you put in here should be cliché free and avoid stating the obvious.

Professional experience
Most people are hired as a result of what they have done before. You should:

• In reverse chronological order, list your previous employers, job titles, locations and dates of service.
• For each employer which is not commonly known, explain the nature of their business, size of organisation etc in two to three lines.
• Outline your key responsibilities / skills utilised.
• List your achievements. If you have only had one or two career jobs, then you should list as many as appropriate. If you have held a number of jobs so far, limit yourself to three or four per position.
• Remember that “achievements” are things you did above and beyond what was required. Meeting your target doesn’t count. Exceeding it does.
• Be clear whether you led or assisted on a project; whether you made the decisions or implemented them.

Tailor your CV to each job you apply for (should this point be pulled out and highlighted?). If an advert asks for specific skills or experience that you don’t usually mention, feel free to replace irrelevant skills / experiences / achievements with more appropriate ones.

Formal education
List your tertiary qualifications, highest first. A few bullet points to explain subjects covered can be added if needed. Make sure you list the institutions and study dates, however overall grades for postgraduate qualifications would not be expected.
If you are fresh out of school, include your school results. If you aren’t, don’t.

Professional development
If you are a member of a professional body or association such as AHRI, add your membership grade in here. Then include list of training courses (TAFE, in-house, or professional bodies’ courses) that you have attended. List those with most currency in the within the industry first.

Hobbies and interests
Some people advise against listing your hobbies and interests in case you put people off. Others counter that you shouldn’t want to work for an employer where your personal interests would be frowned upon.
However, employers don’t just recruit on experience but also on personality, and your interests can help you express that. Probably the best advice is to list only those interests that tell a story about you and that you’d be willing to discuss.
“Socialising” won’t get you very far, whereas stating that you are the organisers of an amateur drama group, write reviews for your local paper or coach your cricket club’s under 12s gives a very clear picture of you.

Referees
If you are happy for referees to be contacted prior to a job offer being made, include their name, position, employer and landline phone number at the end of your CV. If their relationship to you is not obvious (eg they’ve since moved companies) include a brief explanation of who they are.
If you have not yet primed your referees, it is acceptable to put “Referees available on request”.

Proof read!
Run a spell check and get someone to proof read it thoroughly. Every time you make an amendment, read through the parts you’ve changed, once, twice, three times. It could be the difference between getting an interview and never hearing from the company you sent it to.