Your Resume – When You Don’t Have Much Job Experience

Let’s focus on creating a resume showcasing your strengths, when you have a lot to offer an employer, but not a lot of work history.

Start with keywords that describe you. Really describe you. Ask your friends and family to come up with 10 each; you come up with 20. Take a look at all of the words, and organize them in such a way that they tell a great story about you. Here’s an example:
Creative, insightful, caring, strategic, honest, able to multi-task, great communication skills, good follow up, artistic, technical, detail-oriented, thoughtful, fun, friendly.

These words guide your next steps and highlight your strengths. If you can’t think of 20 words, imagine different friends or situations and find words to describe how you were, at your best. For example, maybe a friend of yours needed help, how did you help in that situation? Were you supportive, caring, or respectful? In school, at work, or if you volunteer, how are you in that situation? Organized, hard working, or supportive? Thinking of different context will help you come up with more keywords than thinking generally about “you”.

Next, comes the summary. The key to the summary is that it’s not about what you’re looking for, it’s about what you offer. Your summary should answer the employer’s real question of, “What are you going to do for me?” And, if appropriate, it should address what you’re going to do in regard to revenue or profit. A summary is different from an objective. An objective, in my mind, is dull stuff that doesn’t get traction with an employer.

Objective
College student, studying marketing, looking for the opportunity to learn and grow my skills in a company dedicated to innovative marketing and customer service.

It might seem that I’m exaggerating this objective, however, I’ve seen many like this, and even several where the statement was both about what the interviewee wanted and where more than one word was misspelled. How about:

Summary
Marketing student offers creative content writing skills, enthusiastic customer service, excellent analytical ability, and a passion for all things related to serving clients. Searching for a position in the advertising industry where I can assist with obtaining new clients, producing effective campaigns, and increasing client satisfaction.

Your summary may include another sentence or two related to the specific job. The focus remains what they get in hiring you, not what you will get by working with them.

After the summary, create a two or three column bullet list of things you bring to the job, based on your keywords. Where you can, think of contexts to go with your keywords, create keyword phrases. Your keyword phrases are strengths you bring to the job, whether you performed them previously in your work or personal life, such as:

• Experience using and marketing social networking portals
• Create and promote blog articles
• Strong web user skills
• Ability to multi-task
• Great customer follow-up
• Excellent communicator
• Positive attitude

It’s great to have an abundance of keyword phrases to choose from. I like to categorize them, such as those related to people, managing, operations, office, etc. With several categories, I can grab and organize them depending on the job. For example, applying for an office job changes the order and the mix of keyword phrases than applying for a sales position. The exact order of the keyword phrases also has to do with their length and the way they line up best on the resume, as demonstrated in a sample resume at the end of this article.

After keywords are identified and keyword phrases are created, it’s time to list education and work experience. They both follow the summary and keyword phrases without identifying which job or class each of your strengths is associated to. This is because it’s assumed you don’t have significant enough job experience to separate the jobs and identify keyword phrases for each. Instead, this resume promotes you, rather than your history in any one job.

Let’s see how this might look in a resume. The formatting of this resume needs to be simple enough to be copied and pasted into an email or attached as a document. Over-formatting is a problem with many online resume submissions. You’ll want one version saved as a document, and a second that can be copied and pasted into the body of an email. If you’re applying, for example, through craigslist, attach a copy and add it to the body of your email because there are so many responses, oftentimes employers don’t want to deal with opening a lot of attachments and taking a chance on a virus in one of them.

Don’t include references in your resume, unless specifically asked for. And, then, they are often in the cover letter.

Here is an example of bring focus to you, to what you offer, your experience, and your strengths. By the time the reader gets to your job history, they are able to note it’s not extensive, but have first seen the potential you bring to the table.