By: Joe Norton

I already have a resume, I thought to myself, what point is there in re-doing it? I had already spent considerable time putting down all my leadership roles, athletic endeavors and past work experience. I had already had this resume reviewed by several people, including my Dad who works at one of the finance firms I was hoping to get an internship with. As far as I knew I was going to sit around during this resume seminar and twiddle my thumbs waiting for the clock to tick by.

It wasn’t until the 2nd half of the double header when I learned about the fox resume, how wrong my current resume was, and why I was having such a difficult time getting past the resume drop and into the interview.. .

Recruiters get so many resumes that they go through them just looking for the ugly ones with poor formatting and immediately sort these out of the process without glancing at the content of them. I was shooting myself in the foot by using a non-standardized format I made myself. Using the Fox Signature Resume format I would have a tried and true resume format that is visually appealing and best of all it’s streamlined and efficient in displaying all the information that goes on a resume.

All the formatting of my resume was wrong, I used like 5 lines for my name, address and contact information. I had done tabs and non-traditional spacing all over in the attempt of organizing the info my own way; I didn’t realize how poorly I utilized the space on my resume till I saw the Fox Signature Resume and noticed how it fit much more content, and still looked appealing and not blocky.

In terms of content: All of my extracurricular activities were from my high school days. To my dismay, I was told that employers don’t care that I was the captain of the football team, or that I was the student council vice president in high school . Only college stuff should go on my resume, I was told. This meant about half my resume was totally based on the wrong time period.

Do What I Did, Find SPO’s you find Interesting – I decided on joining several SPO’s so I could get some relevant extracurriculars on my resume and not look like a slacker who attends class but does nothing else “productive” with my time. Once I started going to meetings I couldn’t stop because I quickly became immersed in the organizations and even ended up becoming a webmaster for one, not long after joining. Joining SPO’s for your resume alone is a waste of time I think, fortunately many of you will find that you enjoy your organization and get the opportunity to train yourself in leadership, organization and time management (more fun than it sounds) when it comes your time to take an officer position.

All of my job experience, I learned, was poorly worded and turned off recruiters. I had to re-write all of it and throw some action verbs at the start of every bullet and re-narrow the focus in explaining my experience. I realized that I really hadn’t done myself any favors with the way I had crudely described my experience. I had written the bullets in terms of what I did for the company physically, not necessarily how I added value to the company.

It took a few re-writes – but eventually I had perfected the new format and re-worded my descriptions of past job experience and I was ready for the final stage of getting the Fox Signature Resume complete – and that was the resume critique.

Get Started on Your Fox Signature Resume with the CSPD Resume Guide.
The following samples should be helpful in putting together your own resume:

Sample Resume - MIS Majors
Sample Resume - Marketing Majors
Sample Resume - Accounting Majors
Sample Resume - Human Resource Majors

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 7:55 am and is filed under Joseph Norton, Resume Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.