A good resume gets your foot in the door

It’s the first thing they see – even before a potential employer looks at your face, it’s… It’s the first thing they see – even before a potential employer looks at your face, it’s likely that they’ll read your resume and cover letter.

While competing with sometimes hundreds of other applicants, the question becomes: How can you make your credentials stand out?

“Any resume has to pass the 20 second scan test,” Jennifer Cwiklinski, career counselor at Pitt’s Career Services, said. “If the employer doesn’t see anything interesting on it, they’re going to set it aside.”

Instead of mass-producing resumes, it is important to adapt each one to the specific job.

“Find out what your job will be, and tailor your past experiences to that new role you’re seeking,” Nicole DiMario, intern coordinator at Pittsburgh Magazine, said.

When she reviews resumes, DiMario looks to see if applicants have experience fact-checking, interviewing, interacting with public relations officials and writing.

“Just be as specific as you can,” she said. For each job, internship or other experience you cite, give as much concise detail as possible so that future employers will see the correlation between past experiences and the new position.

Business students need to be familiar with the language, Kate McConnell, director of the CBA Career and Leadership Development Center, said.

“We always say when you go to Germany you speak German, when you go to France you speak French and when you go into business, you speak skills,” she said.

Since the read-over is so quick, punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors are cause for a resume to be immediately thrown away.

But aside from the obvious, business students have to think in terms of two things when describing their experience, McConnell said – value and quantity.

“If a student worked at the Gap, don’t just say ‘I talked to people,'” she said. “That doesn’t say anything.”

Rather, tell the employer exactly how much merchandise you sold, what your hours were and even how much revenue you acquired for the company.

“And that’s using your head,” said McConnell.

And even if an applicant doesn’t have substantial work experience, there are ways of making a resume stand out, according to Jane Patterson, career coach at the Katz Graduate School of Business.

“Sometimes if students don’t have work experience, their best qualification may be a course they took or even a project or paper that they worked on in class,” she said.

Employers understand that not all students have experience in their respective fields – especially when applying for internships during their college career.

Taking knowledge gained in class can give off the right impression.

“It really makes a difference on a resume because it shows the recruiter that even if you haven’t used it in the real world, you are at least familiar with the concepts and terminology,” Patterson said.

As for length, a resume should usually fit on one page.

“One page is always best, but if you would be selling yourself short, use two pages,” said Cwiklinski.

Being concise is of the utmost importance, though.

Omit both unrelated and outdated experiences – virtually every high school experience is no longer worth taking up space once a student has reached college, Cwiklinski said.

“Unless students have something that’s really highly relevant to what they’re trying to do, take it out,” she said.

As for cover letters, one page is an absolute must.

“It needs to be a more formal letter,” Cwiklinski said. “When students are looking at a job posting, if they can take anything from that job posting and use it, they should.”

DiMario, who reads cover letters for Pittsburgh Magazine, said there is a bit more leeway in her line of work for creativity.

“It does stand out to show your personality,” she said. “But I still need to see the work experience you’ve had in the past.”

The cover letter is meant to pull out specific selling points from your resume and highlight a student’s credentials, Patterson said.

“The letters that are the most compelling are the ones that don’t read like a form letter,” she said. “Use the person’s name and the name of the company.”

Though it might be stating the obvious, said McConnell, honesty is always the most important part of the whole application process.

“Always be honest, never lie,” she said. “It will come back to bite you. The world is so small.”

Patterson wants students to remember that the resume and cover letter aren’t the only part of clinching a job or internship.

“The most important way to get a job is to be networking and talking to people,” she said. “There is no such thing as a perfect resume and cover letter that’s going to get you the job.”

Pitt’s Career Services offers walk-in hours for students Monday through Friday from 1 to 4:30 p.m. Students can bring their resumes and cover letters in for proofreading or for suggestions from career counselors, said Cwiklinski.