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Written by: Tracy P. Miller
Editor, Publisher
TearTaylor's Career Corner
Need to create a chronological resume? Don't know exactly how to begin? Well, pay close attention. Immediately below is loads of useful and enlightening information on building concise, professional looking chronological resumes.
Name/Address Header
First, you'll want to make sure to type your name at the very top of the page. To ensure your name stands out or catches the eyes of a busy recruitment director right away, you'll want to bold the name text and also perhaps consider increasing the font size slightly larger than that of the rest of your page's text. A good font to use is Arial, but if you prefer another font then go ahead and use that one instead but just make sure you bold the name header or type it in all CAPS. Then, either on the same line or a line immediately below your name, you'll want to type your home address, email address, phone number and or fax number. It should look similar to the illustration below.
Objective Statement
This section is optional. The objective statement is not necessary in pulling together your resume. If you want to include this statement then go ahead and do so, but just make sure that if you do decide to integrate an objective line in your resume that you specifically state what your career objective is by landing the position you're pursuing. You don't want your objective statement to sound too general or broad like the following example reads.
Professional Experience
Now, go down a couple of lines and type Professional Experience, Work Experience, or anything else appropriate for categorizing your job duties and then go onto type your list of duties (always starting with the most recent company you worked at). The experience header should either be typed in all CAPS or bolded to ensure it stands out more so from other text on your page. Make sure to follow this same enhancement technique for any other section headers you list on your resume.
Next, be sure that when typing your employment information you regularly include addresses and dates. If you omit this information or provide only part of it, then the hiring person gets the mistaken impression that you’re trying to hide something or that you carelessly rushed through the development of your resume. In either case, you don’t want him or her jumping to the wrong conclusion so be sure to include addresses and employment dates. Besides, regularly providing addresses will make it easier for human resources departments to contact your past employers. Additionally, including employment dates will aid recruiting departments in getting a better sense of your experience depth, and coincidentally, your age range.
While I'm still outlining the essentials for building the Professional or Work Experience section, I feel it necessary to talk briefly about power verbs, pronouns, figures, bullets and punctuation consistency since they're also important in the development of your resume.
Power Verbs & Pronouns
When typing your job duties or describing them, be sure to incorporate power verbs in your descriptions as illustrated in the example below. Routinely adding power verbs to your descriptions will help in adding more weight/importance to your professional achievements.
Also, avoid using words I, me, we, etc. in your descriptions. Your resume will read much better without pronouns.
Figures, Numbers
Be sure to use figures or numbers whenever possible to show growth or expansion within markets, divisions, departments, or any specific areas at the company that you personally oversaw. For example, if you worked at a department store and you were responsible for increasing the company's shoe sales drastically, then the following job duties statement definitely wouldn't help in accurately showcasing your real accomplishments. "Increased the company's shoe sales." The next statement, however, does a much better job of highlighting your real achievements here. "Increased company's shoe sales by 45% in less than 6 months."
When typing or describing your job duties it's a good idea to distinguish them by using bullets as illustrated in the graphic below.
Bullets can help to vertically stretch the text already on your page so that any under-developed Work Experience sections will look fuller. Also, bullets help to isolate information better, without them information on the resume can occasionally look jumbled. To see just what I mean, please click on the without bullets example.
Now, if you've been employed for many years and have a lengthy experience section already, you probably won't want to use bullets. Because, again, bullets will effortlessly stretch what's already there, and usually more experienced jobseekers are more concerned with compressing the multitude of job experiences listed on their resumes.
But again, if you're a new jobseeker you should really consider employing bullets in your document. From firsthand experience at reviewing thousands of resumes as a recruitment manager, I can personally vouch for the fact that bullets help in targeting information faster. So if your goal is to have your document read sooner or to avoid having it passed over entirely by an overtaxed resume screener, then you should seriously consider adding bullets to your document.
Consistency Throughout Document
Always make sure you’re consistent in punctuation, headers, chosen text fonts, font sizes, bullets, etc. For example, if you ended with periods at the end of your first three job description statements then make sure to continue ending with periods throughout the rest of the experience section. If you omitted periods in this section, then continue leaving them off. If you used a bold, size 14, Arial font to highlight the header Experience, then don’t switch up and use Tahoma or Century Gothic to highlight the other section headers. Also, never switch verb tenses within your resume. Always be consistent in your verb choices.
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