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)
☐ 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:
Information from the Resume Writing Workshop can be downloaded here: