First time building a resume? You've come to the right place. I'm Sinéad, and coming
up in this video, I have all the tools you need
to build a resume from scratch so you can get your foot in
the door and start working. And if you don't have any
work experience just yet, deep breath, and stop
stressing right now, because it's totally OK. You can still prove you'll be
a great hire with a few tips and tricks. And be sure to stick
around until the very end of the video, because
I'll be sharing how to create an amazing skills
section that will definitely appeal to employers and
amp up the overall power of your resume. All right, let's do this. Let's start with the basics. What is the purpose
of a resume, anyway? Who's reading it, and how
much time do employers really take to review my resume? A resume is your
professional calling card, and it's your best chance to
make a strong first impression on the recruiter
or hiring manager. But since there are often a
lot of candidates and companies do want to fill
positions quickly, most recruiters won't spend very
long reading a resume at all. In most cases, we're
talking, like, 10 seconds. So your goal is to ensure that
your best attributes jump off the page. And how do you do that? Well, that leads us
right to step number one, create a resume outline
and define your format. Getting started is
obviously the hardest part, but an outline will give
you something to work with. Outlines are our friends when
it comes to building resumes. You can either open
a blank document and create an
outline from there, or we have a variety
of resume templates to choose from on indeed.com
that will guide you through building your resume,
which is so helpful, especially if it's your first time. All right, so let's break down
the format of your resume, starting at the top and working
our way towards the bottom. Your name and contact
info go at the top. Your objective statement
goes below that, followed by your education. Experience goes
below that, and not necessarily
professional experience, but also activities
like volunteer work. Add your skills underneath
your experience, and include relevant
activities if you'd like. Keep in mind that
an ideal resume is straightforward
and easy to read, so be sure to set equal
margins all around. 0.7 inches is good to start,
but you can go up to one inch if needed. Choose a standard font like
Times New Roman or Arial. Type your name at the
top in the biggest size font, about 16 to 18 point. Then create your section titles
in a slightly smaller size, about 12 to 14. You may choose to
underline, bold, or center your section titles. Whatever you do
decide, just stay consistent with what you do. Finally, create
the actual content in about 10 to 12 point font. It should be smaller
than your section titles. Don't include graphics. No photos, and no
colorful fonts. We're aiming to keep it
clean and professional so that your work
speaks for itself. Again, check out our
resume builder tool that allows you to skip
formatting completely. All you have to do is
respond to the prompts, and then the tool builds
your resume for you. Within a few minutes, you'll
have a perfectly formatted resume that you can
either download or use to apply to any job on Indeed. Now that we know the best way
to outline and format a resume, let's start filling
out those sections and talk about the best strategy
for first-time job-seekers. But before I get into that,
if you've watched this far, please give us like, hit
that subscribe button, and of course, hit
that notification bell so that you never miss
our weekly career advice. Step two, use the upper
third of your resume to display your highlights. The top part of your resume
gets the most attention. Let's be honest here. Employers are really
busy, and they may not spend that much time
reviewing our material. So it is smart to put the
most important stuff first. The top part of your
resume should include your first and last name. Put your city of residence, and
don't include your full street address for privacy reasons. Next, contact info,
like your phone number and your email address. And pro tip. If you've had the same email
since elementary school, let's make sure your
email address is professional-sounding, so not
like ilovepuppies@indeed.com. Stick to a simple
format, like first name initial dot last name at
your email provider dot com. You could also choose
to include links to other work-related materials,
like a portfolio or perhaps your personal blog. Underneath your contact
info, I recommend that you create something
called an objective statement. Basically, in one
to two sentences, write a statement that
explains your core offering to an employer. So to start, ask yourself, if
an employer were to only read this part of my
resume, what would I really want them to know? If you don't have
prior work experience, mention your background
in other areas. So for example, if you're a high
school student seeking a job as a receptionist, you may say,
"detail-oriented and personable aspiring receptionist on track
to graduate with honors from Hometown High in 2025. Eager to support
office efficiency through proven
organizational skills, as demonstrated by two
years of experience as Glee Club treasurer." For more advice and
resume summary examples, feel free to check out
this video right here. Step three, include
your education. You did the schooling,
so let's show it off. List any diplomas, degrees,
and/or educational milestones that you have achieved
or are working towards, starting with your
highest achieved first. For example, if you
graduated high school and now you are
currently in college, this is how you would craft
your education section. Start with the name
of the institution, as well as the city
and state, and then your expected graduation year. And then put your name of your
degree or your achievement underneath. So, for example, you have,
"State University, Cleveland, Ohio. Expected graduation 2024. Bachelor of Arts, English major. Hometown High School, Cleveland,
Ohio, graduated 2020." Now, it's important to note
that under any educational institution, you can
totally put all your awards and your honors,
such as dean's list or honor roll, and then
extracurricular activities. You may also choose to
add relevant coursework under each school. Now, if you have a lot of
classes to list, first of all, go you. But you also may want to
make relevant coursework its own section on your resume. Either way, it's
best to only list the classes that support your
candidacy for the position you are currently applying for. So let's say you are a
college student applying for a job as a psychology
professor's research assistant. Your relevant coursework
may look something like, "Relevant Coursework-- Statistics, Psychology
101, Intro to Research, Ethics in Psychology." Yes, you might have
taken yoga in college, but we probably don't need to
know that for this position. Step four, think beyond
professional experience. It's a common misconception
that you can only show paid work on your
resume, but this could not be further from the
truth, especially if you are new to the working world or
if you have little experience. It is perfectly fine to
showcase part-time, freelance, volunteer, and even non-career
related info on your resume. Even experience like babysitting
for friends and family can be relevant work
experience, depending on the job that
you're applying for. If you do have some
work experience, this is how you would list it. Start with the title
and affiliation. Add dates to the side. So you have your job
title, an employer, starting month to ending month. For example, "Spanish Tutor,
Self-employed, June 2021 to Present." Then underneath,
you should add three to five bullet
points that describe your key accomplishments. Choose a different strong action
verb for each bullet point, and try to use numbers
and explain your impact when possible. Continuing with our
Spanish tutoring example, you may have bullet
points that say, "Assessed client
educational gaps, identified preferred
learning styles, and developed
personalized improvement plans for four students
learning Spanish, resulting in an average
GPA increase of 0.75 within a month." However, as I mentioned,
as a first-time job-seeker, you should feel free to pull
from a range of experiences in this section, including
academic or personal projects, extracurricular involvement,
club activities, and volunteer work. For example, let's say
you held a car wash for your favorite charity. So you could list the following. "Cash Wash for School Supplies
Project, January 2020. Marketed fundraising event
through a synchronized social media strategy across
multiple platforms, driving 30 attendees. Coordinated logistics including
traffic pathways, team shifts, and necessary supplies,
producing a seamless customer experience and six
word-of-mouth referrals. Managed four volunteers and
customer payment collection, resulting in over
$300 of donations, or one year's worth
of school supplies, for classrooms in three hours." A good deed like a car wash
can go a long way on a resume. Step five, include both
hard skills and soft skills. Many first-time
job-seekers may feel like they don't have
any professional skills, but not so fast. It is so easy for us to
take our assets for granted, so take some time to consider
any skills you have that took any time at all,
or training, to acquire. These are your hard skills and,
yeah, they're very valuable, because if an employer needs
someone with a hard skill, they either need to train
an existing employee or find someone who
already knows how to do it. So if you've got it, show it. Hard skills include words typed
per minute, Microsoft Office, Google's suite of
products like Sheets and Docs, foreign language
fluency, coding ability, software familiarity, and
even social media knowledge, because oh, yeah, that is a
skill that not everyone has. Soft skills like customer
service or coaching can also be relevant to
include, depending on the role. Even if you only have common
knowledge and experience in these things, it's
often worth mentioning. However, this leads me
to my final bonus step, which is step six, find and use
language from job descriptions to tailor your resume. As much as we'd
all like it to be, a resume is not a
one-size-fits-all document when it comes to applying for jobs. So be sure to take
the time to tailor your resume for every job you
apply for, because ultimately, this is what is going to help
you appeal to recruiters. It's also going to help
assist online application softwares that scan
your resume to determine whether you are a match. So how do you
tailor your resume? The skills section, first of
all, is a great place to start. Check out the preferred
and required qualifications on the job posting. Take note of any desired skills. If you meet those
requirements, put them on your resume using
that exact same language so that the applicant tracking
system or the recruiter can easily identify that
you have those desired characteristics. For example, if they say
advanced Spanish proficiency and you wrote Spanish
fluency, change it to match their exact wording. This shows that you've
done your homework, which can impress employers and
have them saying, well, wow, this is exactly what
we were looking for. The skills section is one of
the most obvious places where you can tailor your
resume, but it's also smart to adapt the way that you
describe your work and impact in your objective statement
and your experience sections, as well. It really does make
all the difference. All right, that's a
lot of information, so let's quickly review
the six steps for writing a resume with no experience. Step one, create an outline
and define your format. Step two, use the upper
third of your resume to display your highlights. Step three, include
your education. Step four, think beyond
professional experience. Step five, include both your
hard skills and soft skills. And bonus, our step
six, find and use language from job descriptions
to tailor your resume. We really hope you found
this video helpful. If you did, be sure to
give us a big thumbs up, subscribe to our
channel, and of course, hit that notification
bell so that you never miss our weekly career advice. For even more on
creating resumes, I recommend checking out this
playlist right over here, or for all of the
things we should avoid when writing a resume,
click this video right here. Thank you guys so
much for tuning in. I'm Sinéad de Vries, and
I'll see you guys next time.
