Resume Writing: Student Edition

At ClickTime, we evaluate over 600 student resumes a year for our internships and full-time positions. Here are some words of wisdom to help you rise above the rest:

 THE BASICS

• LENGTH. One page. (No, seriously).

• FONT. CAPS, Bold, Italics, Underline: PICK TWO. Font size must be 10-point or higher.

• HEADER. Your header must include your name, phone number, and email address. We also recommend including your LinkedIn profile and physical address. Your website, design portfolio, and/or Github account are required for developer and design candidates.

• SECTIONS. List education as the first major section in your resume. When listing your school(s), write your date of anticipated graduation (e.g. “UC Berkeley | Class of 2016”), not your length of time at school (e.g. “UC Berkeley | 2012 - Present”). After education, list experience, projects (if relevant), and skills/interests, in this order.

 THE IMPORTANT STUFF

• FOCUS ON THE BIGGER PICTURE. The purpose of a resume is to help recruiters and hiring managers understand your story in one minute or less. We don’t need every detail about your professional life to figure it out; in fact, excessive detail distracts us from the bigger picture. We can dig deep during the interview. For now, show the forest, not the trees.

• CONTEXT IS KING. Recruiters and hiring managers don’t care about what you did; they care about why your work is important and how you made an impact. So when you list a job or internship, kick off the section with a one-line sentence encapsulating your work. For instance, if you’re a Product Manager at a tech company, you could say, “Created new end-to-end product for a profitable SaaS company.” From there, write a couple bullet points about how you made that happen, and the concrete result(s) of your work.

• BLANK SPACE IS YOUR FRIEND. It’s OK if your resume doesn’t fill up the whole page. It’s OK if you don’t have tons of experience. Don’t include every detail of your life for the sake of filling out an entire page. Leave a blank space. We’ll write your name.

• GET A LITTLE HELP FROM YOUR FRIENDS. Writing a resume is daunting. We recommend that you talk to your bosses, colleagues, and peers about your real impact on the job. It’ll help you write a more thoughtful resume and will give you more to talk about during an interview.

• A FINAL WORD. Resumes are never fully finished. They require dozens of revisions, changes, and perspectives before they feel ‘right.’ So if your first, second, or third drafts aren’t home runs, that’s normal. Keep editing and asking for feedback until you’re confident the resume tells your true story.

ClickTime is currently accepting applications for internships and full-time positions. For more information, please check out ClickTime’s Jobs Page (www.clicktime.com/jobs), or email jobs@clicktime.com.