[MUSIC PLAYING] - How you format and lay out the content of your resume is just as important as the actual content because it has to be easy for someone to quickly scan over and pick out the most important pieces of information. Always think that the top third of your resume is a snapshot. It should be everything they really need to know about you in terms of what type of job are you targeting and why are you qualified for that type of job. 

It should sum up what they really need to know about you and give you teasers for the rest of the resume so that they actually want to read the rest. They want to know. I'd go out on a limb and say objective's a dirty word in resume writing. You don't want that on your resume. Why? Because it's the most vague thing in the entire world. It doesn't tell the recruiter really anything about you. And it's all about what you want, not necessarily what you can provide to the employer. 

So instead of having one of those awful run of the mill objective statements, replace it with a professional summary that's your elevator pitch. What are you great at and passionate about? And why are you qualified to pursue that type of role? That's what you want to capture there. Underneath that, you have a core competencies or areas of expertise section. It's a quick summary so they understand exactly who are they dealing with and what's their realm of knowledge to figure out are you a good fit or not. 

When you're looking at your work experience on your resume and you're trying to break it down, I usually recommend a format where you have a small paragraph that describes your role and responsibilities. At the end of the day, what were you hired to do? And then underneath that, you use bullets. And the bullet points are a great technique to draw the eye to your bragging points. Always think bullet points equal bragging points. 

And when you're talking about those bullets, you want to use action verbs. If you are fresh out of school, if you are entry level, you get one page of real estate. You haven't done enough to warrant a second page. You don't get that much real estate. If you're five or more years out of college, you've had a job or two, you have enough material, you're allowed to go to a second page. Your header should be larger and normally anywhere from 13 or 14 all the way up to 16 depending on what you're emphasizing, but your main body tends to be a 10 to 12 font size. 

I recommend going as low as half an inch all the way around but definitely don't go any lower than that. You run into issues with printing at that point. And frankly, if you need to go smaller than that, you're trying to cram too much information in. You need to reevaluate what you're putting in there in the first place.