What type of Resume should I use?
One of the most common requests I get from people I know is them asking for my help to format their resume.
I don’t necessarily think that I’m an expert in Resumes, and I certainly don’t think mine is the best format, but I have spent a lot of time helping others.
When designing anything in life, you need to think about your audience.
Remember, your CV shouldn’t be too much about your ego, but more about facts. But you can add your personality to it, depending on the situation.
What type of Resume is best?
It can be very painstaking to decide on a resume format.
- For professionals (lawyer, doctor, accountant), it’s generally recommended to be conservative and avoid colours and excessive visuals.
- For creatives (designers, artists, musicians) a photo can go a long way to making you stand out, and you might want to add some visuals.
- For services (call centre agent, hospitality), you might want to focus more on your experience with soft-skills such as customer service, etiquette, etc.
Visual CV is a service which I highly recommend, if you can’t decide on the type of Resume that is best. More often than not, you can spend hours formatting and changing your Resume until you get it right.
This service can save lots of time, and can help you publish your CV online.
How should I display my skills or expertise?
Be mindful of templates which display skills or areas of expertise as a graph or progress bar. Not only is this confusing, but this can actually make the recruiter or hiring manager doubt your capability.
Think about this — a progress bar is designed to show progress, from 0% to 100%.
No one individual can ever be 100% at a given skill.
Why are people using progress bars to articulate their skill level?
It would be much better to display your skills in a table, highlighting the number of years’ experience, or the academic level you attained:
- Customer Service — 15 years, Certificate IV in Customer Contact
- Project Management — 8 years, PRINCE II Certification
Should I just stay with LinkedIn?
Of course, it’s always easier to manage your CV entirely on LinkedIn.
By doing this, you always have a live version that you can export to PDF at anytime (or anyone else’s profile, for that matter).
Resume Templates for Microsoft Word
If you’d still prefer to create a Resume manually, I am more than happy to share my template which is what I actually use for my current CV.
All I ask, is please change the profile picture to your own photo 😅
Resume Template – Microsoft Word Download Template