• Interviews are an important path of your life’s journey that decides your future. It is the first gateway to your dream job. Interviews are conducted differently by different organizations. In top corporates, you would have 4 to 5 rounds whereas in smaller organizations or start-ups it may be limited to 1 or 2 rounds. Interviews are not limited only to your educational background, experiences, technical skills, etc, but a lot more than that.

Your resume will be the initial deciding factor to be scaled for an interview. HR first scans through your resume to see if you are the right fit for the company. It is very important to create a resume that speaks about you and your background related to education, work experience, hobbies, skills, etc. The resumes vary with your levels or designation. Formatting the resume with the right kind of descriptions, skillsets, work experience needs to be understood properly by each candidate. The hiring managers while interviewing you would already have a high-level understanding of your career background, hence to catch their attention your resume should project what you are.

First, let's understand what types of resumes are popular. There are majorly 3 types of resumes:

Chronological

As the name suggests, in a chronological resume top priority is given to your recent experiences and then it scales down to the earlier ones. For example, your current experience if joined in 2017 and ended in 2021 December and you first started working in the year 2010, then you need to write the current job position and experience first and the one in 2010 will be at the end. Similarly goes with your educational background.

Basic things to be included in a chronological resume are:

• The crisp and brief objective of your career journey and goals, skills, and achievements
• Work experience starting with the recent one
• Educational background with the highest qualification mentioned first
• Skills, awards, certificates, etc.
• Personal information

Functional

A functional resume is where you give priority to the relevance of your work experience and job title. It focuses more on the relevant skills rather than your designation or position held.

Important things to be included in a functional resume are:

• Objective or the resume summary
• Relevant skills in bullet points under each job title worked for
• Brief work history mentioning the company name, city, or country and the years worked in the company
• Educational background with the highest qualification mentioned first.

Combination

A combination resume is the blend of the chronological and the functional resume. In this, skills are mentioned and the work journey as per the chronological order is mentioned.

What goes in the combination resume?

• Objective or a summary
• Technical as well as transferrable or soft skills
• Work history with roles, place of work, and years of experience in the particular company
• Educational qualification with the latest one mentioned first.

Based on your experiences, education, skills you can create the resume you want to. Many of the job aspirants would have created a resume by looking into a template, a friend’s resume, or an example one, but it should be understood that writing a resume is an art. When the hiring managers scroll through a resume it should immediately catch their attention or should be the one that they are looking out for.

Below are some amazing writing hacks shared that when applied in resume writing would grab the attention of the interviewer or the hiring manager:

• The first important thing is to add only relevant information. Your resume should not be like a story, instead, it should be short and crisp that fit into one page. It should just implicate who you are what you do and your relevant skills. Include only important information pertaining to your work profile. If you are a fresher or graduate starting your career journey, you would not have much information to write regarding work experiences. Mention your highest level of graduation, achievements, awards if any, projects worked on, scores.
• Research and understand the position or job you are applying for and tailor your resume accordingly.
• The objective or the summary statement should be like punchlines that immediately create an impression on the person reading it. It should quickly talk about your professional goals, what have you achieved exclusively in your career, and your experience on the whole. A fresher can just add a line talking about his project achievement in a particular field, or his exclusive skill that may suit the opportunity.
• Formatting of the resume is also very important. Resumes should look professional by using only black colour for the text, minimum lines, preferably white or grey background, and the right fonts, for example, Calibri, Times Roman New, Arial are universally accepted professional fonts. Your resume should be easy to read and understand. Minimize the usage of sophisticated or tough words that would confuse the interviewers.
• Professional resumes should follow the order and should be structured properly. Hiring managers would be looking out for the relevant keywords related to skills and position. The resume should be able to perfectly project the searched keywords. The structure is as follows:

1. Name
2. Contact number
3. Email address
4. Objective or summary
5. Work experience along with positions, company names, and year/s of employment
6. Education qualifications
7. Relevant skill sets
8. Achievements and recognitions
9. Relevant Personal information (known languages, hobbies)

 

• It is optional to add your social media profiles to the resume. But if added keep your profiles updated and professional especially on LinkedIn. This is the place where the company, recruiters, hiring managers find you. Add a professional image, use the right keywords, update your work experience, your best works done like articles, blogs, etc, educational background, and your description should speak about you.

 

• Proofreading your resume is the most important. Scan through the details entered and get it proofread by your friend or colleague. Check for spelling and grammatical errors, fonts, colour, etc. Before sharing it with a company or job portal keep it up to date with all the necessary information.

Hope this blog has given you a fair understanding of the types of resumes and how they are to be written. As it is rightly put actions speak more than words, similarly your resume should speak more with relevant information like your achievements with some facts and figures rather than writing it like a story.

Today, resume writing is considered an important skill to ace interviews. To gain in-depth knowledge on resume writing and to create apt resumes for your experiences and skills, you can also avail certain courses offered by companies like The Tatwa wherein trained professionals can not only help you in building a resume that fits your requirements but also excellently train you on how to ace the interviews with mock interview sessions, email etiquettes, telephonic rounds and more.