Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

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I get lots of requests from people to review their resumes. Unfortunately, I am just not able to review all resumes because of time crunch. Instead of reviewing each resume one by one, and not giving due attention to it, I had compiled a list of suggestions about how to write an effective resume and an effective cover letter based on my experiences and observations.

My sincere apologies to those people whom I didn’t reply with my feedback about their resumes. I strongly request them to visit above links because when I will be reviewing your resumes, I will be looking for those suggestions only.

But recently, I reviewed one resume, and I found one suggestion, which is already mentioned in the above linked articles. The suggestion to write an effective resume is –

Do not write paragraphs under your work experience details.
Try to list down your details in the bulleted points. For a recruiter, bulleted approach is a handy and quick approach to grasp important things from your work experience details than a paragraph approach.

Here is how the resume was written before in a paragraph format –

As a Software Developer and Project Leader, I am leading two applications, which mainly involves understanding the existent systems, identifying enhancement requirements, and performing impact analysis of proposed requirements. I am also responsible for estimating the efforts and assigning it to the development team. I am using VB script, JavaScript technologies with SQL Server 2005 for these applications. I am also responsible for the production support of these applications.

Here is how I suggested changing above paragraph format to a bulleted format –

• Role: Software Developer and Project Leader
• Analyzed client’s existing 2 different applications
• Defined new 2 major and 4 minor enhancement requirements
• Negotiated with client on feature scope, schedule and resources, which resulted in more business to the company
• Managed a development team of 3 members for software development efforts
  • Estimated efforts and defined schedules for different tasks
  • Allocated resources to appropriate tasks
• Developed enhancement requests in VB script and JavaScript with SQL Server 2005
• Supported the time critical production issues

I hope that you will find my bulleted approach effective than the usual paragraph approach.

There are many ways to improve how you write your resume. Things that I have mentioned in above linked articles are not exhaustive ones. If you have suggestions or feedbacks about how to write an effective resume then please write your views in a comment section below. I would highlight those suggestions in future posts for the benefits of readers of this blog.