Resume Checklist

Information:

Only necessary information should be included.

☐ Name

☐ Phone Number

☐ Email (If using school email make sure to change your email to have your full name present)

☐ Linkedin

☐ GitHub

Introduction (Optional):

Profile

  • Like a summary, this essentially is 2-3 sentences describing you.

Summary

  • This would best be applicable with a 2-page resume where you want to get your key points across.
  • If you are going to create a summary of strengths make sure to include specific experiences to back these strengths up.

Objective statement

  • Balancing personal goals and value to employers in this statement.
  • Focus on what you can offer to the company.

Education:

☐ If your GPA is above 3.7, put it on there.

☐ Include Relevant Coursework and Relevant Projects

☐ If your extra-curricular involvements are sparse, then make an extra effort to highlight skills and experience acquired through education.

  • Can be as simple as listing the relevant coursework to the position you’re applying for
  • If not as obvious, a few bullet points may be needed to explain why the experience is relevant to the position

☐ If not in first year, omit your high school experience.

☐ Instead of “Nth year” put 20XX-20YY (Expected)

Content:

WHO Method:

What you did: Tasks, responsibilities, projects or role

☐ State experiences that are relevant to the employer’s needs as outlined in the job description.

How you did it: Skills, strategies, or approach

☐ Demonstrating relevant skills learned/acquired through experiences.

  • A relevant skill is a skill that is stated in the job description or implied to be needed/beneficial
  • (eg. a consulting company will want to hear more about your engineering design classes, and a technical position will be more interested in your technical skills)
  • If you cannot link a skill to an experience, then list it under a separate skills section.

☐ Identifying transferable skills

  • This would be identifying skills in non-engineering fields that could help in engineering.
  • An example would be leadership as a skill and being the captain of some sports team.

☐ Use plain language so that anyone in HR can somewhat understand your experiences

☐ Use impactful words to help your experiences resonate.

☐ PROPER GRAMMAR/SPELLING THROUGHOUT

☐ Highlight soft skills within your experiences.

Outcome: Achievement, result, impact on yourself or others

☐ Always try to quantify experiences and skills so THE employer can:

  • Trust the information more, and
  • Have a deeper understanding of your achievements.

Format

☐ If two pages, are you making good use of the 2 pages?

  • Always aim to have a 1-page resume

☐ Are the margins between lines wide enough such that the resume doesn’t feel crowded?

☐ Focus on short bullet points ­­­– one liner bullets

  • Overall focus on having a visually pleasing resume

☐ Does the resume make your information easy to digest (i.e. can the employer get a good idea of what your skills are within a short amount of time?)

  • Tinker with bolding/underlining headings, changing certain font sizes, etc.
  • Want to make it as easy as possible for reader to digest information as quickly as possible

☐ Are the headings effectively describing the content contained within that section?

☐ Place sections in order of relevance

You can download this checklist here:

Resume_ChecklistDownload

Information from the Resume Writing Workshop can be downloaded here:

Resume-Writing-ResourcesDownload
Resume Workshop PowerPointDownload