What to Include in Your Resume?

A Resume is a professional and a brief description of you and your skills. Your resume plays an important role in placement (on-campus/off-campus both). So, it is very important to build a suitable and good resume in order to get noticed and shortlisted by the recruiters. Here are some of the key contents and tips that one must add to one resume. A good resume is that which is brief yet complete and has all the subheadings that are mentioned below.

1. Name: You should add your full name (first name followed by the middle name and last name) in bold font. Never add your nicknames to your resume.

2. Profile: A profile is a summary that states who you are as a professional. This summary includes your interests in a particular professional field like whether you are an engineering graduate or you are from a business background or you are any designer. 

Always remember why are you writing this resume for example whether you are looking for an internship or full-time job and keep updating it accordingly. Add a brief description of your skills and interest like if you are a mentor, problem solver, developer, etc, and support it in your resume by giving facts and results. 

Example of a student looking for an internship: “Pre-final year student, a problem solver, and lead of Developer Community at my college. Looking for an internship in the software development field. Fascinated by Open Source and willing to contribute to it. Love to connect with people and work with them collaboratively to build something productive for society and the environment.”

3. Contact Details: Your contact details are a very important part of your resume for a proper communication flow between you and the company. So, always provide a proper, correct, and complete contact detail in your resume. It must include:

• Your Address detail along with the area pin code.
• Email ID: e.g. ABC@gmail.com
• Phone no. with Dialing code of country: e.g. +91 98xxxxxx05
• LinkedIn Profile: e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ABC
• Some people also mention their other social media handles and blogs. If you add such information to your resume always make sure that these social media handles are relevant, professional, and active.

4. Mention your Educational and Experience details: Write your educational qualification and experience in reverse chronological order. For freshers who don’t have any experience, they can add details about their internships. One must add the institute name, board, time period, percentage, or CGPA.

• For freshers, it’s OK to add their schooling details but suppose for an experienced professional with 6 and above years of experience, it’s not that important. So, they should add their past companies in which they have worked along with the responsibilities they were given in reverse chronological order.

5. Projects: If you are from technical background then you must add the projects you have made. Projects are one of the best ways to express your knowledge with practical proof. Mostly, the interviewer asks the interviewee questions regarding their projects. So only mention those projects on which you have actually worked. Under the project name, you can add the technologies you have worked on in making this project. Points that you can add :

1. What ease your project has brought to the real-life problem.
2. A total number of users of your projects.

Projects can highlight your achievements in a way your job designation can’t. So, make sure that you’re adding projects along with publications and patents (if you’ve got any) in the resume. 

6. Skills: There are usually two types of skills: Hard/Technical Skills and Soft Skills. Both skills are important depending upon the position and job role you are applying for. Skill requirements may vary from company to company, therefore it is suggested to read the job description very carefully and add your skills that match with the company. Remember to add the key points from the job description. 

Examples of Soft Skills: Communication, Teamwork, Time management, Stress management, etc.

Example of Technical Skills/Hard Skills: Programming, Data Analysis, Project Management, Marketing, etc.

You can always use the following points even if you are not from a technical background :

1. Communication Skills
2. Leadership Skills
3. Critical thinking Skills
4. Project Management Skills
5. Presentation Skills

Read More: 7 Key Technical Skills For Your Resume

Addition Section: This is the section that can help you to grab extra attention compared to the other candidates in the queue. You can add here your :

• Awards 
• Certificates                           
• Hackathons / Coding Contest Ranking                                         
• Patents                              
• Languages known
• Conferences / Courses
• Hobbies

Add only those skills that are relevant to the job description you are applying to. Any 3–5 skills can work. 

Things to be kept in mind while writing resumes:

• Never exaggerate any point.
• Showing a willingness to learn gives a positive impact on the interviewer.
• Try to keep your resume as brief as possible, max. 1 page.
• Never lie in your resume. If you don’t have certain specific skills don’t add them. Otherwise, it will ruin your whole resume and interview opportunity.
• Recheck your resume again and again in order to avoid any grammatical mistakes. You can use grammar checking tools like Grammarly, Small SEO Tool, etc. 
• Always remember to mention key points from the job description in your resume.
• Avoid adding unnecessary things just to fill the blanks in your resume.

You can build your own structure of resume or can use free tools for building the structure of your resume like GeeksforGeeks Resume Builder, Google Docs, MS-Word, etc. Select the template of your liking and fill out the form accordingly.