How to Write a Resume Template

August 5th, 2009

Resumes are all purpose documents intended to showcase a workers talents to such a degree that a company wants to meet with them to see if they would be a good fit for the company. This person interview session is a chance for a potential employee to make a case for the intended job. The resume only gets a person the interview. it is up to the individual to be able to sell himself.

Now, having a resume handy for any job that comes down the pike would take an extraordinary amount of work. On the other hand, you could just have a generic one to send off to an employer. While neither of these sound particularly feasible, there is another possibility that does exist — the resume template. By compiling and saving this type of document, you can easily change a few things and have the resume appear to be custom written for the job opening (it actually is, but you won’t share the secret).

Let’s get the basic resume format down first. In your favorite word processing program, start with a header (name, address, phone numbers and email address), job objective (what you are looking for), education (schools attended, dates and degrees awarded), experience (all work history including companies, dates of employment and major duties) and a miscellaneous section (hobbies, pastimes, military service, certifications gained etc.) where you can can decide what to include here. Save this as resume template.

Now, when a job comes along, just tweak a few areas and you have a custom resume. The most important being the objective section. Take a few keywords from the job advertisement and place them in your statement. You will almost certainly gain the attention of the reader and get promoted to the “to call pile”. Congratulations! Keep this template and revise it when necessary (i.e. as you gain more experience, add that to the experience section). You will be glad that you did. Now go get that template made. Good luck!

Until next time,

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