My friend who works there hasn't been terribly happy with the place either.
As for the resume, I've been using a derivation of the one the career counselors in college helped me put together. It's been criticized lots over the years (and flat ignored by the consulting companies I've worked for), but it's never seemed to cause me any problems getting jobs.
Unless it's entirely incoherent, I don't think a resume is going to be a killer one way or the other. Perhaps in the past, when companies judged you by the quality of the paper you had your resume printed on, the look and feel of the resume could be the dealbreaker, but as long as you follow the basic guidelines, I don't think it matters much.
First, pick the format you want. There's *lots* of good info out there to be had. Google resume writing or examples and see what you can see. You don't need to pay a service for that.
Somewhere at the top should be your name and contact information. On mine, I have my education background: College, dates attended, degree, GPA.
Next, list your job history. I list job title, the company I worked for, the dates I worked there, and several lines highlighting what I did there. As a computer programmer, I try to highlight the specific projects I worked on and played a key contributor with. I list the items as several bullet-point lines, using an active tense to describe my actions. As in:
- Developed credit card processor daemon for middle-tier software application using C++.
- Rewrote a web, C++ CGI program to parse and replace customized tags on HTML pages.
...and so on. I never use the words "I" or "me". The resume is supposed to be more like an outline, referring to the person in third person, as if to say these are the things the person at the top of the page did.
Lots of places like to use a skills summary section at the top of the resume, but I'm still undecided about them. I list the specific skills I used as a bullet point, broken out with each job I worked for. That's both good and bad because some folks might not want to scan the entire resume to see what I've done. OTOH, others prefer to see which skills I used with which job. Using both is problematic because, as a programmer, I've changed jobs a lot and have a rather lengthy resume. Consulting companies who have tried to shoehorn my skills into a summary only have caused me problems in interviews because folks don't know what's current and how I used it. If you're going for a network admin position, you'll probably want to use a skills summary to highlight the skills you have that apply to the position.
Final point: Spellcheck, grammar check, and format check! I can't stress that enough. The one thing that'll make you look dumb to a prospective boss is a resume, reflecting the best of who you are, that contains easily correctable errors.
Hope this helps. Good luck! |
