How To Create A Resume In Ms Word: Fill & Download for Free

Being on both sides of the coin, here are a few things that I observe when someone applies at my (tech) startup for a Software Engineering role:Objective: no, we are not interested in knowing your beaten-to-death objective of ‘utilizing my blah blah skills to create value for the organization’. Either write a unique objective, or better, don’t write it at all.MS Excel: seriously? Out of all the software engineering skills, if you mention Excel on your resume while applying for a software engineering role, your resume is going to get ignored. Writing things like MS Word/Excel while applying for Software Engineering roles indicates that you could not find better stuff to write on your resume. Edit: Excel lovers, read this comment. Excel is undoubtedly an invaluable skill, but that should not appear as a primary skill when you are applying for a Software Engineering role. Note that at the top of this answer, I have mentioned that my answer is from the context of the Software Engineering role onlyTypos: well, I am no grammar nazi, but I do not appreciate typos on the resume. When I see a typo, I do not judge the candidate’s grammar. I rather judge his/her seriousness about career. If you cannot make a perfect 1 or 2 pager for your career, how are you supposed to write perfect code? Mistakes do happen, but did you not have plenty of time to proof-check your resume?Word Resume: resumes should only and only be in PDF. It is easier to manage because a PDF file simply opens up in the browser. Downloading a DOCX resume and then opening it in MS Word is a real pain.Extra-curriculars: yeah yeah, you’ve been told by your school teachers that extra-curricular activities are important for jobs. Keep that only to your school. We don’t care if you were a sports secretary in your high school. I’ve received resumes where the cover letter went like this - “hi, I was a well-known dancer in my school and I would be a great cultural fit. So, please allow me to apply for the Senior Software Engineer role.” Edit: check this comment. Note that this is much like the excel point - extra-curricular activities are important, but they should not be the primary thing to appear on your resume when applying for a Software Engineering role.Personal information: there is no need to mention the street and the block. Just the city name is fine. Name, email, phone number, and city - that’s all is required. Please keep in mind that your resume should be short and simple.Certification: “I certify that the above information is true to the best of my knowledge” - not needed! It will take us just 3 - 4 questions to figure out if you’re lying about your Python skills. You need not certify that, it looks a bit weird.Graduation percentage: we care more about your graduation year than your graduation percentage. You may be an 85% scorer. But then if the highest is 99% (which we are unaware of), you are just ok. On the other hand, you may be a 65% scorer, but then you may be at the top of your batch. We do not maintain a repository of the highest percentages of various colleges. We simply care about the year you graduated, not your percentage. Graduation year is important to get an idea of the prior experience of the candidate. Some roles require experienced candidates only.The point of the resume is to primarily convey technical abilities. Other stuff (like extra-curricular) is captured in the interview where we are interested in knowing if you are a good cultural fit.Edit 1: Clarification on the last point regarding graduation year - the graduation year conveys the number of years of experience and that’s an important evaluation criterion.Edit 2: All those who are commenting about various points, please understand the most important point - when I say that extra-curricular don’t matter much, I don’t intend to talk about super good resumes that mention some extra-curricular activities. I am talking about those not-so-great resumes that are filled with just extra-curricular activities, without other more important things like programming skills, projects, etc. Many candidates simply ignore important points and fill their resume with unnecessary information like objective, certification/declaration, extra-curricular, etc which hardly matters. Those are the resumes that I’m talking about. I guess I should have clarified that upfront though. :)

I’m including some updates in this answer. If you’ve read it once, take a look at my additions.How to write a good resume for North American employers? Listen up friends from overseas. I’m writing this for your benefit. I live and breathe resumes for a living. I’ve seen it all. You too can have a good resume. All it takes is a bit of work and refining your communication style.I’m also super blunt, I swear a TON and I use a lot of robust, confrontational expression. Don’t be offended. But do take my advice.Remove the word “involved” from your resumes. This is a huge issue if you’re from the Indian Sub-Continent. The cultural attitude is “you are a contributor on a team; subordinate to strong leadership.” That’s perfectly good. In the US, when we see that, we ask, “What the fuck does that even mean? Were you —like— involved by way of making coffee for the team? Did you clean their desks?” Never say that word again. If you did it, say what you did. Use action words. Use action words.Never say “participated” again. “I participated in daily debrief meetings.” Nobody cares what you participated in. How did you contribute to the meetings? Did you just sit like a wallflower and do nothing? Then don’t say anything. So what, you’re shy. That’s okay. Don’t apply for jobs where you need to be “not shy”. Apply for jobs where that’s okay. If that’s the kind of job you’re after, then they won’t need to hear you lie and pretend to have done otherwise. If you DID participate in the daily meetings, then say, “Led meetings from time to time, discussed blah blah blah.”Stop saying “we”. Nobody gives a shit about what your team did. They care about you. They’re not hiring your old team — they’re hiring you. If you did it, say you did it; describe what you did. Remember that admonition about using action words/phrases? Good. Glad you remember that.Don’t say, “worked in …”. Nobody cares what you worked in. Say what you did. “Achieved in stock audit percentages at 96% in a $50-million-dollar store” works way better than, “Worked in $50-million-dollar store.”Don’t say “responsible”/ “accountable”. If you were “responsible for supervising 56 employees”, then use the action sentence: “Supervised 56 employees.” If you were “accountable for delivering monthly status reports”, then say, “Delivered monthly status reports.”Stop using fluff words. Don’t call your experience, “Rich, deep Java experience.” One — you aren’t making pornography. You’re doing whatever it is you do for a living. (Which, I guess could be pornography. High five.) Nobody wants your fluff words on the page. Be curt and direct. Two — nobody wants to read a hundred-page resume that is fluffed with useless adjectives/adverbs. Other fluff words are “dynamic” – no you’re not. Stop saying it. In fact, just remove all adjectives and adverbs unless they are specific and measurable to the task you performed.Never say “I”. You shouldn’t be speaking in first person anyway in a resume. You’re not being graded for using perfect sentences with subject, verb thingamajiggers. Use action sequence statements. “Delivered 18 pizzas per day. Achieved customer satisfaction award three months in a row.”No strange colors or pictures. You don’t have to put symbols of all your certifications in the header/footer section. The resume should be mostly text, perhaps some bullets. No crazy shit. You’re not an artist (but if you’re an artist, go ahead and do the crazy stuff).Align the declension of your verbs, tense and other such words. Your current job is present. “[I] Make coffee. [I] Print TPS reports.” See, the “I” is implied. Just leave it out. Your past jobs are all simple past tense. “Planted rows of corn. Murdered kittens in barn. Hid bodies under sister’s bed.”Friggin spell / grammar check a hundred times. Have someone else read it. Seriously. Why do I even need to say this? If you’re sending your resume in the US, you need to change your language settings to US English (and vice versa in the UK or wherever else you’re sending it). We say, “specialize”, “color”, “program”, “labor” and “mechanize” (etc). Your spell-checking software should be updated accordingly.Do NOT be afraid to put “Mr” or “Ms.” (only “Ms”; not “Miss” or “Mrs.” given that the former indictates no marital status and that is nobody’s business) in front of your name. Why? Because if you’re from a part of the world where Westerners may not know the difference between a male or female name (or if your name conveys none — even in the west that happens), this will help alleviate using the wrong pronoun and causing embarrassment. If you are worried about gender discrimination in your line of work; then leave that off. Your call.If you did it, list it. If you didn’t do it, don’t say you did it. This cuts to the truth of the matter. Here’s an ugly stereotype American recruiters have of foreign resumes, in particular from India. This will hurt: “They’re all total liars.” One tiny mistake on your resume makes you a stereotype. I do NOT approve of prejudicial lazy generalizations — ever. But I work in this industry. I hear what my peers say. I read the LinkedIn posts. Don’t be a stereotype.[1]Shorter is better. Do you really need a six-page resume for your eight years of experience? This recruiter gives you permission to use a two-page resume or maybe —just maybe— three if the experience is diverse and extensive. If not, it goes in the trash. Does your job description of your most recent assignment honestly need a page and a half? I don’t believe you. Not for a second. You’ve got TWO pages for a resume or maybe THREE if you’re really super good. Unless you’re someone I desperately need, I refuse to look at resumes longer than two pages. Don’t bother. Impress the shit out of your recruiter and keep it short and sweet. [2]How do you do that? Stop sending stock resumes. Write a stock resume and then adjust it for the client in question. Your stock resume can be a hundred trillion pages for all I care. But you better pare it down and use the company’s lingo when you submit it. If you worked at Google or Facebook (pretty much the top of the pyramid for any developer) for two years as a contractor, you get ten bullet points to describe your experience. That experience —if the most recent one— should not take up more than a half page. Many of the things you do are implied if you’re a “Java Developer”. Nobody needs to know what magical tool you used. Stick with the really important success stories of what you did.Adjust your resume if you’re submitting it to a client that mentioned that super-dee-duper rare tool you used. If they didn’t ask for it, then assume that your resume will be the “appetizer” and your interview will be the main course. Keep it short and sweet. If you have 15 years as a Java Developer, you don’t need to list every single thing you did at every single job. List the most recent five jobs if you’ve been doing the same thing. List the technologies you touched (comma separated). List four or five successes. Then just list the jobs after that going back ten years. You’re okay to say, “I have 15 years of experience” but leave off anything from the list that goes beyond 10. It’s not an application for employment w/ background check. It’s a resume.Research stock US resumes. I find it appalling that in some countries people mention race, religion, tribe, etc. Do not EVER do that here. Ever. Never ever ever! Don’t ever send your picture.Nobody cares about your hobbies or community activities unless it’s relevant to the job you do. Even then, leave it out.Stop ending your resume with “references available upon request”. You’re not conveying new information and I submit they already know you’ll furnish them if asked.Additional details listed as numbers above [1] or [2] etc.:[1] I have a lot to say on this and I really do mean it when I say that this kind of generalization and racism disgusts me. One, it’s hypocritical. I know as a recruiter that all people lie; there are not perfectly honest human beings. When Americans arbitrarily decide that Indians are liars, they’re overtly saying, “Our lies are okay; their’s aren’t.” I don’t suffer that.But permit me to split some hairs so that you can (a) understand where this comes from (understanding is important) and (b) understand how to address it when you see and experience it. I’ve said this a billion times, there are few groups of people that I respect and adore more than Indians. Yeah, that’s a bit of reverse racism, but I mean this more culturally. There are some cultures that I like and some that I love. I have an awkward fascination with India. I want every immigrant to come to the US and be successful.So why are the lies that Indians tell different than the lies non-Indians tell? I’m going to paraphrase the director of an Indian contracting firm that I work with, who explained to me why it’s different. Per him, “In India, the only thing you can trust, that consistently works for you is family. Companies and government, people you don’t know and organizations are all out to fuck you. They are corrupt. Some of them are so totally corrupt that they create a system whereby lying to them balances the equation. Why be honest with them, if they are working to fuck you over? Indians bring that value to the US without realizing that while there are certainly organizations that are corrupt and will fuck you over here, it’s nothing like the way it is in India. So in their heads, it’s okay to lie to get ahead even if it means creating totally fraudulent resumes.”What are the best typefaces to use in a resume?[2] Shorter is better? Okay, I allowed a three page resume here because it was really good, it was diverse and it would be really hard to shorten it to two pages and express what this lady has done (all personal details have been changed). A three or four page resume is not —honestly— a kiss of death. But it can be. I’m not double-talking here. Stick with two unless you have the length of history and chops to make it three, but please … no more than that.See: Dan Holliday's answer to What is the importance of mentioning our current address in our resume?

If I saw "highly proficient in Microsoft Word, Office, and Excel" on a resume I would immediately dismiss the entire resume.Word and Excel are components of Office. Listing them as "Microsoft Word, Office, and Excel" shows a lack of understanding of that fact.If you have "no office work experience" I would really be interested in your explanation of how you became "highly proficient."If you have "no office work experience" do some volunteer work to show your ability. People want to see examples, not just catch phrases.For example:Gained valuable experience in Microsoft Office as a volunteer for the XYZ organizationUsing MS Word created monthly news lettersUsed Excel for keeping track of membership mailing listSpecific examples like that, show your proficiency. Much more than simply stating it.Sorry if this answer proves my membership in the Cranky Cynic Club, but I just had to answer it. I am really trying to understand if the OP is seeking genuine career advice, or asking how to embellish on a resume.