HR is all about Leadership & Change Management

1) Keep it short. The effective resume is preferably one page, two at the most. If you’ve written a novel, tear it apart and whittle it down to one/two pages.

2) It must be easy to read. That means the effective resume is well organized with clear headings, brief statements of responsibility, bulleted points for emphasizing achievements.

3) It must avoid overly specific professional jargon. Keep in mind that your resume is likely to be read first by someone in the HR department who may not have a clue what you’re talking about when you say... "Chaired brain dump resulting in a turnkey solution to improve customer’s ROI." Rather, talk like an earthling and state it plainly: "Boosted customer sales 20%." Take care to craft a resume with universal appeal so as to at least get to the starting gate.

4) Curb your design enthusiasm. That means limiting your font selection to one or two. Use the traditional and popular New Times Roman if you prefer lettering with a serif, or consider Arial, Helvetica or Verdana if you prefer san serif fonts, lacking the slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter. Go easy on the bold and the underlining. And limit your paper selection to white or beige with a weight of 22 or 24 lb. Black type.

5) The effective resume is tailored for a specific position. I understand that may mean cranking out slight variations of your resume every day of the week to target different job postings. Nobody said a job search was a walk in the park. Jump over to Job Resume Objective for more on this.

6) Portray yourself as a problem solver.

7) Quantify your accomplishments with hard numbers whenever possible.

8) Don’t mention your current, or expected salary on the resume.

9) Don’t mention personal information, like whether or not you’re single or married, whether or not you have kids, whether or not your hobbies include golf or listening for extra-terrestrials with the modified ham radio contraption in your garage. Especially that last one.

10) Check, check, check for misspellings. Don’t ever, ever, ever submit a resume or post it online without doing a spell check.