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?