Resume 101: Choosing the Right Format for Your Resume

Today we begin a series of posts discussing some resume preparation basics. These are the fundamentals of building a career-marketing document  -- and just like the fundamentals of playing a musical instrument or a sport, you must master the fundamentals before you can succeed at more advanced levels of career management.

Let's begin with the issue you must address before you construct or revise a resume for a specific job opening - what format the resume will be in.

There are 3 basic resume formats: chronological, functional and targeted.

Chronological Format
The reverse chronological format resume is like your best interview suit, the one you keep hanging in the closet "just in case" - it's not there to win fashion awards, but rather to signal to a potential employer that you understand the standards of your industry and can behave accordingly.

A chronological resume starts the "work history" section with your current or most recent position, and works backward in time until you are to the beginning of your job history, OR to the beginning of the most recent chapter of your work history.

(This point is important when you have been in the job market more than 20 years. If you are now vice president of marketing, it may no longer be necessary to include your first position, where you mopped floors and cooked breadsticks for your local pizza joint.)

According to a Dummies.com guide to this type of resume format, the pluses of the reverse chronological structure are:

• This upfront format is by far the most popular with employers and recruiters.
• The format links employment dates, underscoring continuity. The weight of your experience confirms that you’re a specialist in a specific career field.
• It positions you for the next upward career step.

There are a couple of major downsides to using the reverse chronological resume format.

• It can spotlight periods of unemployment or brief job tenure.
• Without careful management, this format reveals your age.
• The format may suggest to employers that you were plateaued in a job too long.

Functional Format
The functional resume format shouts what you can do instead of relaying what you’ve done and where you did it, and therein lies its problem. It is a good idea for job-seekers with challenges that will be painfully obvious when their experiences are presented in a chronological resume - someone with long gaps in employment due to caring for an aging parent, for example. However, employers understand that many people with breaks in employment or those changing career fields use the format to downplay those issues, so they tend to be suspicious of candidates that use this format.

Kristen Fife, an experienced recruiter and resume writer, discussed some additional problems with the functional format in an interview with Dr. Janet Scarborough Civitelli on the VocationVillage.com website:

"Hiring managers and recruiters want to see a progression of your skills as it relates chronologically to your work history. A list of skills followed by a bunch of job titles gives no indication what you have been doing in the last 3-5 years. There is no context for how you gained the skills and how they have been applied. A functional resume gives no information of career progression and how you take ownership of your career and move forward."

She does, however, note one situation when a functional resume is a strong positive:

"The best time to use a functional resume is if you are in a truly portfolio based career - such as producer, PR/Advertising, or freelancer w/ multiple clients concurrently. If you are using the same skill set across different clients, that is when a functional resume makes sense."

Targeted Format
The targeted approach to resume formatting is actually an amplification of the other two formats. Once considered a plus when approaching an employer about a job you're especially well suited, the targeted format is now what helps candidates move out of the pile of "not good enough" resumes into the "call these people for interviews" pile.

Creating a custom resume for each position you apply for can be exhausting, especially if you are starting from scratch each time. According to a Dummies.com guide to targeting a resume for specific job, the key to efficient targeting is to develop a "core resume" that includes every factor in your background that you could potentially use to customize a resume, from experience, competencies, and skills to education. This is your working model, something you will never submit to an employer, but a rich well you will draw from time and time again to craft a "spinoff" custom version. Use as many pages as you need.

Once you've got an "off the rack" version of your resume ready, it's time to research the requirements of your desired job and custom-tailor your resume to show off the great "fit" between you and the position. You are looking for keywords, those descriptors of skills, abilities and accomplishments you will see over and over again if you read position postings in a particular line of work. When you read over a position listing, highlight the keywords that stand out. Then you can adapt your career summary and your work history entries to reflect, in an organic sort of way, these keywords as they relate to your career.

Here's a link to a sample job listing and a targeted resume developed in response to the listing, presented as part of the Dummies.com site.

~Liz Massey, Managing Editor, ASU Alumni Association