Resume review: I called, you answered.

Thanks to all who have sent resumes to review! I'm going to do two this weekend (hopefully--don't quote me on that; I have out of town company coming for eight days) and post the results next week. In the meantime, I'm curious if anyone had any resume help available at their schools, perhaps as part of a student job/leadership/success center-ish thing? I think I attended a one-hour workshop/lecture that was hosted by someone from the student success center at my undergrad school, but then I also recall buying or borrowing a book on writing good resumes back in the late 1990s as I reached the end of my grad school career.

Some schools will offer a workshop with several architects available to look at and critique student resumes; if you have a chance to participate in that, it's a good source of feedback, and sometimes you can even land a job that way. Otherwise, a good book is better than nothing. Other than that, using common sense is key--checking for spelling and grammatical errors is absolutely required, and make sure that you keep your resume to one page. If you have less than five years' experience, and you haven't cured cancer or won the Virgin Galactic prize for creating the Space Elevator, you don't have enough worth talking about to make two pages. Keep it short, simple, and strong--especially good to do in a competitive labor market like the one we're in now.

Have a great weekend, and I'll post some redlined resumes next week!