Creating a perfect resume key for landing interviews

By Travis Ball
The Collegian

A good resume can lead to an interview with a potential employer if created the right way.

“It is your sales pitch of who you are, what you are, and what it is you can offer them,” said Adrian Ramirez, a career development counselor at Fresno State’s Career Services.

“Think of a resume as a marketing piece,” said Rita Bocchinfuso-Cohen, Director of Career Services at Fresno State. “You want to put together something that will market you well for the industry and the position that you are interested in obtaining.”

Like an interview, appearance means something when it comes to a resume.

“I think that it needs to be orderly,” said Meredith Bell, a junior nursing major at Fresno State. “It’s the same reason why you kind of dress up a little bit when you go to interviews.”

According to Bocchinfuso-Cohen, job recruiters will look at a resume for about 30 seconds or a minute before quickly deciding its fate — no, maybe or yes. So, a few basic guidelines should be followed.

“It needs to be easy to read, it needs to be clean and neat, and it needs to have relevant information on it — something that is relevant to the person that is going to read it,” Bocchinfuso-Cohen said.

Ramirez believes students need to do an inventory of themselves before tackling a resume. “They need to understand who they are, what they’re about, and what they can offer the employer,” he said.

When it does come time to create a resume, Bocchinfuso-Cohen said the first one is usually the toughest. “That’s probably the biggest hurdle for students, ‘what do I put on there?’” she said. The important basic parts of a resume are contact information, education and work experience.

Bocchinfuso-Cohen said anything other than that is an enhancement.

The best way to tell an employer about your skills may be to list various duties and responsibilities from previous jobs.

Bell, who started creating her resume six years ago, thinks so. “Any sort of experience you have, whatever job, shows a certain amount of responsibility.”

Typical cash-in-the-pocket jobs are more important on resumes than some students may think.

“Everything that you do, no matter how mundane and monotonous the tasks were, taught you something on the job,” Ramirez said. “The thing I want to stress is that people are not pumping up what they did.” He said students should use action words or “buzz words” when describing what their job entailed. For example, you weren’t just someone who stocked clothes at Mervyn’s, you organized and maintained. “It’s word play,” Ramirez said. “Believe me, you handled a lot, you just don’t think of it in that way.”

Being that resumes are a way for students to market themselves, they should understand that parts of their personality will be seen in the document. “Disorganized or organized it kind of tells you what kind of priorities they have,” said Fresno State student Kris Stone, a senior criminology major. He said if a resume has a lot on it an employer might think the subject is ambitious, or if they don’t have a lot they’re not as ambitious. No matter what is taken from a resume, Kris said students should put a lot of thought into them.

Bocchinfuso-Cohen said slapping together a resume without putting much time into it could turn out to be a bad thing. A bad resume will hurt a student more than having no resume at all.

“A perfect resume is one that gets you interviews,” Bocchinfuso-Cohen said. “If you’re getting the callbacks for interviews for the kinds of positions that you want to be interviewed for you don’t need to change a thing, it’s serving its purpose. If you’re not getting calls, that’s where you need to look at your application material. That’s where maybe your resume isn’t marketing you very well and needs changing.”

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