Critiquing Tips
While it is always a good idea to get numerous people – career professionals, former bosses and colleagues, mentors, and the like – to review and evaluate your resume, you might want to first consider reviewing and critiquing your resume using the following considerations. Upon review of each criterion – be completely honest on how your resume rates.
A resume should be a well thought out, detailed summary highlighting the most significant accomplishments, skills, education, training and responsibilities of your career. Remember the purpose of your resume – to create enough interest from the employer to invite you to a job interview.
How well does your resume perform? Have you followed all the rules and guidelines of good resume writing? Using the following criterion to objectively evaluate your resume for improvements…
- Overall Appearance: Do you want to read it? Does it look good without reading it?
- Format and Layout: Does the resume look professional, well typed and printed with good margins, etc.
- Proofing: Is it free from grammar, spelling or typing errors?
- Focus: Does the content point to the employment objective?
- Specificity: Does resume avoid generalities and focus on specific information about experience, projects, products, etc.?
- Relevance: Has extraneous material been eliminated?
- Completeness: Is all important information included?
- Writing Style: Is it easy to get a picture of the applicant’s qualifications?
- Skills: Is the resume skill based? Count the number of skills listed.
- Accomplishments: Are the applicant’s accomplishments and problem-solving skills emphasized?
- Keywords: Are keywords and phrases easy to identify?
- Action Orientation: Do sentences and paragraphs begin with action verbs?
- Length: Could the resume tell the same story if it were shortened? Is it a reasonable length?
- Integrity: Is it an honest presentation of your best?
- Scannability: Is it designed to be easily read by a scanning system?
- Appropriate: Does the content capture an employer’s interest?
- Bottom Line: How well does the resume accomplish its purpose of getting the employer to invite the applicant for an interview?