How to Write an Impactful Resume for a Campus Interview!

Your resume speaks a lot about you and determines whether or not you will be shortlisted even for the interview as it reaches your potential employer much earlier than you do. An impactful resume serves as an advertisement targeted towards your future employers and thus the significance of a well-drafted resume cannot be stressed enough.

Writing a resume can be challenging, especially if you are a student who has no prior experience in drafting a resume. Your resume helps employers develop a deep understanding of your skills, strengths, and experience. A good resume must reflect your accomplishments, recognitions, education, experience, and every other exceptional accomplishment that aligns with your future in terms of your career goals. A resume is much more than just a document; it is a tool for marketing yourself in the job market.

Basics of an impactful resume

The preferred style: When it comes to writing a resume, broadly 2 styles are followed; chronological and functional. In a chronological format, a resume focuses more on experience and career history, whereas a functional resume focuses more on skills and education. So, as a student who is writing his first resume for campus recruitment, your ideal resume format should be a functional one, for it will highlight your skills and knowledge and put less focus on your work experience.

Be aesthetic: Yes, your resume must be aesthetic and neat. Many people don’t consider it important, but remember, what soothes the eyes, pleases the brain. When conducting a campus recruitment drive recruiters go through hundreds of resumes, the least you can do is save their eyes some torture. Following are some of the practices to make your resume appear more aesthetic:

• Maintain a steady font style throughout
• The alignment of text must be kept ‘justified’
• Font size should be consistent throughout
• All the titles or headings must maintain consistency

The right length: Remember you are writing a resume and not a biodata. An ideal resume should not be longer than two pages. Recruiters are not looking for lengthy stories and long paragraphs, what they are looking for is a summary of your skills and educational background which is on point to convince them that you are the right candidate for the job on offer.

Focus on academics: As a student who is writing a resume for campus recruitments you may not have much to offer in terms of experience, so you must compensate for the same by glorifying your academic record. The point is to convince the recruiter that you are the right fit for the role. You must emphasize your academic history by mentioning your degrees, educational institutions, achievements, and academic awards. You must start with your latest academic qualification and provide all the related details such as the name of the university or college, percentage scored, and year of passing.

Extracurricular activities: As a student who seeks a job, you must include your extracurricular activates in your resume. When you introduce extracurricular activities in your resume it provides the recruiter an opportunity to know you better in terms of your character, skills, and interests. It helps them determine whether or not you are a team player and have leadership skills.

The language: Resumes are all about first impressions and we know how important they are. You certainly would like to leave an impression that you are careless and less deserving by compromising on language, tone, grammar, and spellings. The usage of active language must be prioritized while reducing redundancies. Another important thing is to use appropriate action verbs and there should be zero spelling errors, Last but not least, you must carefully edit and proofread your resume. Resumes are the first step of the ladder of your professional journey and how much effort you put into your resume tells the recruiter a lot about you.

Get help: Writing your first resume can be extremely tough and it might leave you clueless. If you also face such a situation, do not shy away from seeking help from your teachers, family members, and seniors; these people have been there and done that. You will be amazed as to how with a little help and guidance your resume can turn out to be a much impressive one. You may also refer to various resume templates available online, but make sure you just refer and not blindly copy one.

Your resume is as important as your first job, so you must spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and effort on it.