Resume Tips for College Graduates
As a student, you may not have an extensive employment history. We have resume tips for college graduates with limited backgrounds and techniques to bolster their resumes to make them more effective.
College Grads Need Our Resume Tips
We already have pages of tips to write resumes, cover letters and more, but this guide is targeted for students who recently graduated or are soon to graduate and need to write these documents. The problem with starting a new career is that you most likely don't have much of an employment history. Alternatively, if you do, it may not be relevant to the career you are now pursuing.Another problem may be that you don't have a solid employment history so that can leave you at a disadvantage when the other applicants do. These tips can help you to level the playing field by showing you ways to create an Experience section for your resume. Check each point discussed below to choose which ones can be the most helpful to add more effectiveness to your writing.
Career Help Center
Eight Resume Tips for College Graduates
- No Experience
You say you have no experience? Maybe you do and you don't realize it. Were you involved with any type of internship or volunteer program while you were in school? If you were and it was relevant to your field all the better. You can list that under the experience section.
If you didn't participate in any programs like these it's not too late you still can. We wrote an article that describes how to get an internship, this may be an avenue you can explore to gain some experience. - Action Verbs
When you get something to write in your Experience section you will want to write it with words that can communicate a sense of action and accomplishment. These are known as action verbs, they are valuable in that by using action verbs instead of conventional verbs you can amplify the importance of your accomplishments. This tactic can be used for many sections. Our list of action verbs is a good place to learn what these words are. - Keywords
Another treatment you can apply is to carefully choose keywords that you can take from the ad for the job itself. You can more finely target your resume to the job by using those keywords. Our guide on this practice discusses how to implement this maneuver to many different sections that can benefit from keyword usage, this is also known as keyword optimization. - Orthography
Orthography, what is that you say? A fancy word for spelling. The message here is to check and double-check your spelling and while you're at it check your grammar too. And, it never hurts to have a friend or two look it over to proofread it to see if they think it's OK. - Page Length
Making it as short as you can would give it a better chance of it being fully read, or being read at all for that matter. The Human Resources employees are not going to read it with their full attention, but rather they will skim though it to pull out what they feel is important.
You need to write in a manner that presents the details that you think are important, so they pop out and make the reader take notice. Put important items at the beginning of each sentence and toward the top of the page. If they stop reading halfway through they will still have read your most important details. It is accepted practice to make it one or two pages in length, preferably one page if possible. - No References Here
Don't waste valuable space putting them here. Put your references where they belong, on a separate reference page. - Objectives Or Not?
Having an objective statement used to be the way to go, but now not so much. It may be a good policy to include one in some industries so check to see if it is appropriate in yours. If it is the case not to have one you could focus more on the Skills section. - What Shouldn't I Write?
Leave out specifics such as your religion, race, gender, age or other personal details that as far as the law is concerned are illegal and are not allowed to be considered when selecting a candidate.
