UH-Victoria

Checklist for Resumes

 

A resume serves as a marketing tool that summarizes your relevant experiences and highlights your accomplishments. The following checklist may be useful to ensure your resume has key elements.

 

Contact Information . . .

  • Is it easy to find and read your personal information (name, address, phone number, email, and URLs)?

  • Does your name stand out from the rest of the text?

  • If your resume is more than one page, does your name appear on the other pages?

Content . . .

  • Are categories placed in appropriate order with relevance to the job ad?

  • Are the headings logically organized? Are the important headings in positions of prominence? Are they grammatically parallel to each other?

  • Is the use of bulleting or listing appropriate? Is it parallel?

  • Have you used action verbs in your lists?

  • If the resume is a chronological one, is the information given in reverse chronological order? If the resume is a skills one, are the headings appropriate (do they describe skills)? Do they accurately describe the information under them, and are they parallel?

  • Is the resume free from spelling errors?

  • Are the references easy to find?

  • Is the reference information complete (name and title, institution or organization, complete address, phone numbers)?

Visual Appeal . . .

  • Is your resume balanced visually?

  • Is your use of white space appropriate? Is it used well to emphasize and organize important information?

  • Are the headings emphasized (bolded, underlined, etc.)?

  • Are the headings easy to find?

  • Is the paper the resume is printed on appropriate in color and weight?

  • If your resume in two pages or more, have you effectively used all white space? (At least two-thirds of the final page of the resume should be full.)

Finally, pretend you are a potential employer. Evaluate the effectiveness of your resume. How/why is it effective? Where might your resume need improvement?