Your resume serves as your gateway to securing an interview. It is therefore vital to approach it with the recruiter's perspective in mind. Consider what recruiters would find compelling: a concise, relevant, and engaging document, or a lengthy and dull one?
As you write your resume, try to put yourself in the recruiters’ shoes:
What would the recruiter want to read?
The recruiter is looking for a person who will fit in with the organization they are representing. So, you will need to provide information on your skill set and proficiency and convince the recruiter that you can work with the other team members.
Collect Information for Your Resume
Before even thinking of putting the information onto a template, we recommend you start by collecting the information you need according to the recruiter’s expectations. The facts that you need to include are:
1. A title for your resume
Indicate what you are looking for.
2. Your contact details
Believe it or not, some people actually forget to add their contact details. Don’t be one of them! You need to include:
Your first name and last name
You email address
Your telephone number
Your geographical location
The formatting of your email address is a significant part of your toolkit. Make sure to use “firstname.lastname@gmail.com" or a similar format. Steer clear of more whimsical email addresses to maintain a professional identity. Remember, you want to be visible, but you are not a Hollywood film star, so you don’t need your name in flashing lights.
3. A personal statement
A personal statement is a short paragraph that will allow the recruiter to discover your personal attributes. They allow you to showcase your unique qualities, explain your motivations, and demonstrate why you are a strong candidate for a particular opportunity. They should be well-written, genuine, and tailored to the specific purpose for which they are being written.
This is usually considered the introduction to your resume and is found at the top of the page. The personal statement should be 3 lines or 4 sentences long and have three parts:
who you are
what you can offer
your career aspirations
4. Your employment history
Represent your jobs in reverse chronological order, with your most recent job at the top.
Job title
Date of employment
Name of company
Responsibilities, missions
Accomplishments and achievements (for example, "increased sales by 20%," "nominated employee of the month")
Make sure that you have the correct dates, titles, and details of your prior work history. If you have worked for associations, charities, or clubs, you can include them too. Just check that you have the correct formal names of the organizations and not just acronyms.
5. Your skills
If you have limited work experience, are applying for an apprenticeship unrelated to your education, or have gaps in your employment, you should consider writing a skills-based resume.
A skills-based resume will enable you to highlight your transferable skills, the skills that you gained from previous work experiences or volunteer work, which could be valuable to an employer. For instance, let's look at Samantha who has experience as a waitress but wishes to land an apprenticeship as a digital marketer.
Consider matching your soft skills with those specified in the job description. And don’t forget other skills like foreign languages that you speak or have learned. In an international context, being able to communicate in a foreign language is an asset to any potential employer.
6. Your education
Here again, you should indicate the information in reverse chronological order with your most recent diploma first.
Diplomas, scholarships, awards, or certificates
Name the education and training organizations
Dates of training and qualifications
If you do not have any significant training or diplomas, that is fine too. If you are enrolled on an OpenClassrooms Path you can mention:
Name of the path
Diploma/certification
Scheduled date of completion
7. Your hobbies and interests
These are social activities that you practice on a regular basis. Most of the social interests that you put on your resume will say something about you to the hiring manager. They will allow you to resonate with the interviewer or provide information about character traits they might be looking for.
So, selecting activities for your resume is about choosing what aspects of your personality you want to highlight and communicate. To help you decide on what to include:
Choose a hobby or social interest - this could be volunteer work.
Try finding what you specifically enjoy about it.
Explain why it is important to you.
List between 3-5 personal interests or hobbies.
Avoid generic hobbies like reading, cinema. Try to be more specific. For example, instead of “Reading” you can write, "Reading murder mysteries" or "Reading self-development literature.”
Samantha
Name Your Resume
Create a generic version of your resume that you can call V1. Whenever you apply for a job, you can modify your personal statement to correspond to the expectations of the job description and rename the document. This will help you find the resume that corresponds to the job application. Furthermore, you make it easy for the recruiter to save it to their computer without having to rename it.
type of document _first name.last name_ job title_company_date
Your Turn!
Now you can start working on your resume.
If you use ChatGPT to get good ideas for your resume, remember that you will still need to check that the content is correct.
Try using the Hiration templates to help you.
Let’s Recap!
Your resume is the first encounter with the recruiter, so it should be impactful. Make it count!
Use this resume checklist to help you and remember to:
Display your personality, motivation and skills in your personal statement.
Give tangible proof of your skills and showcase your professional achievements for each role, using action verbs. See here for a list of action verbs that you can use.
Match your experiences and skills with the job description.
Highlight your personality, your organizational abilities, and your ability to collaborate.
Describe your OpenClassrooms projects if you have completed a Bootcamp.
Limit your resume to one or two pages maximum.
Well done! Once you are happy with your resume, you can start applying for jobs.
Use this link to upload your resume to our apprenticeship talent marketplace.
Start applying on other job boards. It's time for you to shine!
In the next chapter, you will focus on how to write a cover letter.
