Tailoring a Resume

Sentry

Well, it's time to dust off the old resume and try and get the hell out of this soul-sucking job. Being a mid-level professional, my usual resume just isn't going to cut it. That being said, I have a lot of good stuff on my resume, stuff that I would like to keep on there while still providing a way for prospective employers to see their desired qualifications quickly and easily without having to go on a scavenger hunt for them.

So, anyone have any advice on how to do this? My main problem is this... say I have my current job with has a variety of responsibilities, only a few of which are on their list of desired qualifications... if I wanted to keep several important things on there that may not be in their desired qualifications, how should I do that, or should I even bother?

Uncle Long

Depends on how you're structuring things. Generally, if you're tailoring, you want to have the qualifications that they're looking for (obviously) and if you think there are other qualifications that they don't have listed but might set you above the other candidates you are going to want to work those in too. You can list them right in the column with whatever job in which you gained them or, and this doesn't look as good imo, you can list them in the "Other Qualifications."

Jimmy King

I generally just re-arrange the order of the things I list based on the job. For awhile I was sort of on the fence both experience and ability-wise for programming and networking job.

If I was applying for a networking/system admin related job I would put my server and network admin related experience towards the top... configuring and managing server applications such as apache and postfix, monitoring apps like nagios, etc. Then things like writing scripts for monitoring network stuff. Then any other potentially relevant things.

When applying for development jobs I would shuffle that around and put programming that was either more complex or more directly related to the job first. Then smaller programming things. Then any other stuff that may be relevant... scripts for monitoring servers, experience with configuring/maintaing servers for jobs that would involve some of that, and so on.

This was within the duties for each job. The jobs themselves I listed in chronological order starting with the most recent and working my way back. Jobs that were wholly unrelated or pointless I would leave off unless I really needed them there to not show a huge gap in employment. if there were several jobs within a short timeframe (I did contract work for several years), I would pick the ones most closely related and potentially leave off the others, depending on how long my resume was with the jobs listed and what job I was going for.

3lwap0

I actually created two resumes, one for the Network Administration/Sys Admin, and one for the Industrial Security side stuff I do. If you have a multi-discplene career, segreate that expierence into two seperate resumes. Keep your applicable job expierence front and center, and cut out the other crap that has no bearing on what your applying for.