Sample Of A Combined Style Resume: Fill & Download for Free

Thanks for requesting our response! There are several steps in the methodology of creating a resume, but know that there is not one exact, correct way to go about it. It is a good idea to have a target position in mind when you start so that you can tailor your resume to your audience. It also helps to have a master list of your education, professional experiences and accomplishments handy so that you can plug them into your final resume. I will expand on our ideas for formatting your resume first!Select a Professional Resume Format: Functional, Chronological or CombinationResumes typically come in one of three formats: chronological, functional or a combination. As the most common format, chronological resumes highlight work history and begin by listing your previous positions in reverse chronological order. Functional resumes focus on directly showcasing skills and experience relevant to the positions to which you’re applying. Combination formatting is, as you might have guessed, a blend of the two format types that starts by drawing attention to experience that shows skills and abilities relevant to the role at the top and moving into chronological experience. If you have previous recent experience in your field, a chronological resume is the most convenient and effective resume format. However, if you’re looking for a career change, a functional or combination can place your relevant information at the top and help an HR manager quickly connect your experience to the position’s responsibilities.Arrange your Content based on the “F-Pattern”Keeping the “F-Pattern” concept in mind when resume writing will help you see from an HR perspective how a potential employer will read your experience. The F-Pattern suggests that visually, content at the top and left side of the resume will most likely be read first (as suggested by the “F”), especially in a first-round review in which your resume may only get a few seconds of an employer’s time. Using this pattern as a guide when arranging your resume holistically as well as when formatting each individual section can help you make strategic choices about what to emphasize and where to place it.Include Bullet Points to Help with Resume Readability & ImpactUsing bullet points within your content as opposed to narrative writing can optimize your resume’s readability and make a positive first impression. This is true for your work history in particular. For example, using a bulleted list that shows strong action verbs to start each statement – Led, Supervised, Managed, Directed, Created, etc. – helps link your content to the skills you have developed. Thinking again of the F-Pattern, an HR manager will naturally read the first line and down the left side of your job content. Using bullet points here which lead with action verbs will quickly show a potential employer that you have proven skills and can create results. Bonus tip: choose your action verbs based on the language found in job descriptions of positions to which you’re applying for maximum impact.Choose the Right Length: One or Two Pages?One of the most common questions resume writing services receive: “How long should my resume be?” Your amount of relevant experience should determine the length of your resume. Note that more content does not necessarily equal more experience from a hiring perspective. At maximum, you should not need more than two pages to describe your relevant experience unless explicitly requested or submitting a CV for a highly academic role. If a recent graduate or new professional, a one-page resume should be sufficient in describing your most applicable experience. If you’re a seasoned candidate with multiple years’ experience or several previous positions held, a two-page resume may be most effective.Improve Resume Flow with White SpaceOne pitfall to avoid when resume writing is including so much content it’s difficult to discern what information to focus on. White space is useful because it helps create a visual flow for the recruiter or HR manager and draws their eye to important information. Keeping your margins at half an inch minimum and using at least 8pt spacing in between content can help make sure your resume isn’t overwhelmingly packed with information.Use Simplicity to your AdvantageWith many potential resume styles, formats and templates to choose from, it’s difficult to decide what the best way in which to present your resume is. If you’re in a creative field such as graphic design, your resume can be a sample of your work. If you’re not in a design-focused field, however, using a simple formatting and design on your resume helps reduce the chances of it stylistically clashing with an HR manager’s preferences or resume pre-screening software. Keeping your resume simple with few variations in color and font typeface, style and size is a great strategy to make sure your resume is easy to read and professional. Above all, a top rated resume’s design will always match the style of the field and complement, never detract from, the content.We hope that this gets you started in your resume crafting process! We also have some tips on how to write powerful content. If you would like more career advising, drop us a line! Happy writing!

The most awesome technique that I discovered by browsing the résumés over at Crowdsourced Résumé Review - Crowd Vitae (a sort of Quora for résumés) reduced the font size and opacity for older and less relevant jobs in order to fit the entire résumé on a single page. Combined with an elegant and clean design, this made for one gorgeous résumé.Some other tips:pay attention to your tenses and voices, e.g., make sure that your present job is in the present tense, while your past jobs are -- obviously -- in thepast tenseuse a so-called "modern" template style with sans-serif fontsto reiterate, get rid of TNR! (that's Times New Roman)include an objective/profile section that is really particular to you, and doesn't just use fancy and meaningless termsalways aim for 1 page, but 2 is ok if absolutely necessarymake sure to include suitable line breaks, and don't be overly crowdedexperiment with a recent trend of creating a "sidebar" into which you place some of the more ancillary information, like contact info, education history, and skillsthe standard "objective" is indeed practically faux pas now, but a"personal profile" of sorts, highlighting how and why you are unique and stand out, and why you want a particular job, can work to your advantage, i.e., if it really intrigues the reader, but of course, YMMV

I don’t know what will come next, but I know what should come next: carefully calibrated and standardized work-sample tests.Think coding and algorithmic interview questions but less arbitrary and ad-hoc:designed to faithfully represent the actual work environment (no whiteboards!)standardized between interviewers—all candidates are evaluated on exactly the same testclear, objective evaluation rubricWe do this by designing a comprehensive programming task ahead of time that faithfully represents the actual work somebody will be doing. The name gives it away: we evaluate candidates by looking at a representative sample of their actual work instead of trying to proxy this with undergraduate-style exam questions on a whiteboard.The advantages are massive: you do a better job of evaluating candidates for the actual role, you clamp down on random noise by keeping the test and test conditions constant and you limit bias by focusing primarily on objective criteria. Much, much better than the ugly and inconsistent processes we get now where most companies have engineers design, administer and evaluate interview questions themselves¹.In research I’ve seen on selection metrics, work-sample tests tend to be the single most powerful instrument used by themselves, and are part of the optimal combination of instruments to use. “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings” by Schmidt and Hunter is a comprehensive survey of research on the subject through 1998. The main conclusions of this survey are:work-sample tests have the best predictive performancegeneral mental ability tests (ie IQ tests) also perform wellstructured interviews perform on par with GMA tests and much better than unstructured interviewsthe core effective methods (work-sample tests and structured interviews) perform better alongside a GMA testWhile structured interview do perform well, most tech company interview processes are closer to unstructured interviews. Interviews at tech companies tend to neither be standardized across candidates nor to have clear, objective evaluation rubrics. Some companies like Google have moved to a more structured approach, but I believe even that falls short of the ideal. The questions are often designed and selected by the engineer performing the interview, with no rigor around their validity.Now, to be clear, this survey paper covers selection across a variety of fields, and it’s plausible that it doesn’t apply 100% to the specific field of software. But it’s a much better starting point than the “common sense” and anecdotes that seem to dictate modern hiring policies in tech!Here’s a table of the methods analyzed in the survey, along with a validity measure (r):Work-sample tests have the best individual performance, followed by structured interviews and GMA tests. At the very bottom are graphology and age, which have effectively no correlation with employee success. Years of job experience, reference checks and years of education also perform surprisingly poorly—so avoid factoring those into your processes.In the United States, GMA tests are a poor option for legal reasons: they open you up for discrimination lawsuits under the theory of “disparate impact” (see Griggs v. Duke Power Co. for the seminal case on this matter). Companies can protect themselves by performing an (expensive) study to validate the impact of IQ tests for their specific positions, but this is not worth the expense for most companies. IQ tests are also fraught culturally: I suspect many engineering candidates would be turned off by needing to go through an IQ test as part of hiring.It’s plausible that brain teasers fall under the same disparate impact standard as IQ tests. This hasn’t been tested in court—it would probably be a difficult case to make—but it’s a real possibility. Yet another reason to avoid brain teasers!In the US, the choice is simple: base your entire selection process around a work-sample test. While you can supplement this with additional factors, it should be the most important selection criterion.You can see a rough progression in tech interviewing from brain teasers and other nonsense towards work-sample tests, but it hasn’t come nearly far enough. Considering that the research results on work-sample tests have been around for a while and are intuitive (the best procedure is the one that most closely resembles actual work—who would’ve thought?), the fact that more companies aren’t moving in this direction is an indictment of an industry that spends a remarkable amount of time and money on recruiting and selecting candidates.To be fair, switching to work-sample tests does not come without challenges. You have to carefully design the tests—serious up-front work you don’t need with an ad-hoc interview process. You also have to administer the tests in a constrained time frame and in a way that works for different candidates. Of course, once you have it set up the test will take less work for individuals to administer (engineers no longer need to make up interview questions) and, crucially, it will be both more accurate and more consistent.To me, the case for switching to work-sample tests—or at least properly structured interviews—seems clear. But the tech interviewing world runs on anecdotes above everything, so let me leave you with one by Thomas Ptacek on switching to a more structured process at his security firm, Matasano:Compare the first 2/3rds of Matasano's lifetime to the last 1/3rd. The typical candidate we've hired lately would never have gotten hired at early Matasano, because (a) they wouldn't have had the resume for it, and (b) we over-weighted intangibles like how convincing candidates were in face-to-face interviews. But the candidates we've hired lately compare extremely well to our earlier teams! It's actually kind of magical: we interview people whose only prior work experience is "Line of Business .NET Developer", and they end up showing us how to write exploits for elliptic curve partial nonce bias attacks that involve Fourier transforms and BKZ lattice reduction steps that take 6 hours to run.How? By running an outreach program that attracts people who are interested in crypto, and building an interview process that doesn't care what your resume says or how slick you are in an interview.Call it the "Moneyball" strategy.(From a long, detailed comment he wrote on Hacker News.)So why not do this at your own company?footnotes¹ If you’re wondering just how bad normal interview processes are, Aline Lerner did a compelling analysis of data from her startup (an interview platform):After a lot more data, technical interview performance really is kind of arbitrary. The conclusion? 80% of the people who had done multiple interviews on the platform performed inconsistently between interviews. On a scale from 1–4, a surprising number of people had scores ranging 2–4 or even 1–4.Not a good sign for the traditional tech interview!