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How To Make a Resume, Recruiter & Insights by Luis Mojica

My name is Luis Córdoba Mojica, I am Lead Recruiter at Softon and I have more than 2 years of experience in the Human Resources field; focusing on Recruitment and Selection. One of the most common inquiries I receive from many of my candidates and friends is: How do I go about building my resume?

It’s easy to look at a Word sheet like the one we have here and ask oneself: What do I do now? Where do I begin? What can I include?

ejemplo-1In some cases, this task is intimidating, especially if you don’t have work experience or don’t feel like you are a fit for the position. For that reason, I want to take the advantages that I have learned from my own resumes and from the resumes that I have seen, to create this guide with data and tips that can help you take that first step to create a curriculum.

A curriculum will generally have four main parts:

• Personal information
• Work experience
• Academic training
• Skills

Even though, these parts are considered “main parts” does not mean that they are the only ones that your resume should have; some resumes will have more, but these four are the most important.

Personal information:

Personal data is very important to the resume since this is the way in which you will be identifying yourself with the recruiter who will be viewing your information. Not all your personal data is necessary for this section and it is very important to recognize which ones are essential to be able to include them.


• Must include:
• Full name
• Email
• Phone number
• It should not include:
• Full address
• Marital status
• ID number
• Age or date of birth
• Last GPA

As you might already be realizing, the data that you should include is the one that allows the recruiter to identify and contact you in case the rest of the curriculum aligns with the position to which you are applying. Those who are not are those who do not fulfill that task.Check this example

Work experience:

One of the most important sections that can be found in a curriculum. However, despite the fact that you may not have a single work experience, not everything is lost. There are plenty of options for you to include as well.

In general, this section of work experience must always comply with the following:
• Reverse chronological order (from most recent experience to oldest)
• Use bullets to simplify reading
• Use action verbs

If you have work experiences:

• Talk about the last 3 positions you’ve had or the last 10 years of working life
• In case you do NOT have work experiences:
• The ideal order in these cases is internships, professional practices and, finally, volunteering.
• As you can see, even without having had “formal” work experience,the internships or internships that you could experience in a career or technician can provide you with important tools for a future job opportunity.

Academic training:

In this section it is not necessary to indicate the academic training you received in school, kindergarten or elementary school. It is much better to just include college or high school education if you do not have a college education. In case you have not finished your studies, you can indicate a possible graduation date if you are finishing it.

Skills:

In this section you can include various details regarding your skills such as languages ​​you master and courses or training that are relevant to the position. It should be noted that in the case of languages ​​avoid using percentages, instead it is better to use words such as “basic”, “intermediate” and “advanced”.

General tips:

Finally, I would like to end this article with some important tips that should always be considered when creating a resume.

The resume must be created for the position. It is important that when creating a resume you have the job description available since you will want the skills requested for the position to be reflected in your resume. You will create a new resume for each position that you apply since not all positions will ask for the same skills.

For example, at some point if you apply to a position that seeks for a more creative role, you can take advantage of the artistic skills that you have had in your life, while another more administrative position will have to bring out the organizational skills that you had in the same experiences. It is very difficult to have a resume that applies to any and all positions so keeping up to date and creating new ones is essential for a good resume. It is ideal for your CV to be in English if the position demands a high level of that language.

Sometimes positions will request soft skills such as leadership, a sense of urgency, among others. Do everything you can so that those skills are reflected in your resume to be able to make a better fit with the profile that is being requested. If the position requests a person with leadership capacity, you can comment at some point in your life in which you have had to lead a team or a project.

If the position asks for proactivity, you can include in your resume an experience where you have had to seek solutions before problems arise. It is important that you can exemplify or demonstrate situations that you have had to make use of those soft skills since they are difficult to present in a concrete way without examples.

It is important to try to make the information you include in the resume can be incorporated in only two pages. This is because recruiters do an initial scan of your profile and if it turns out to be too long, a correct scan cannot be done since there are many details to consider and, in this way, you increase your chances of being discarded from the processes.

Final step, save the file in PDF format and with a clear name with your first and last name and a sign that is a resume. Files in Word or with names that do not refer to a resume are not reviewed by recruiters and they will dismiss you from the process without having time to meet you.

In conclusion, making a resume is a complicated task, but not impossible. You must take into account elements that recruiters ask for in each job position and do everything you can so that your skills and experiences align with what they are requesting. So doing a new resume every time you apply for a new position is a very good practice.

Additionally, building the resume with the job description at hand can help you identify which skills from your repertoire you should include to be a better fit for the position. Related to the previous point, by knowing what information you should share, you will know, consequently, what information is not necessary and you will come to respect the length of two resume sheets.

Finally, I hope that this guide on how to make a curriculum can be helpful for you and for all future processes in which you will be participating. This is not an exact science, so do your best to experiment and see what works for you when creating your resume. However, it is important to adhere to general considerations so that your resume stands out from the crowd. Do not be afraid to be wrong because it is the only way to know how to improve and how to do it.