Resume Extravaganza - My hires
So my choices were....page 8, 13, 20, 28, and 31. Coming in a close sixth was page 2. A lot of things stood out to me during this excercise. First of all, after you get warmed up, skimming a resume for just a few seconds becomes pretty easy and you get good at quickly weeding out the weak resumes without even reading much content. Even if a resume makes it past this first 5-10 second glance, another 10-20 seconds is usually good enough to find some content that makes the resume qualify for the trash. It really makes you realize how good your resume has to be to pass this initial 30-45 seconds and how proper formatting with a nice flow can really help you out. Also, it seems order is very important. A few of the resumes were ordered in ways I did not really think was correct and it made them confusing to read, I think you want your resume to stand out, but not because it had an obvious flaw from the start. Lastly about what I learned, you can't just stuff the page. Some of the resumes were just overflowing with information and it didn't all seem important and it made me just want to skip over the resume rather than trying to decipher all the information that seemed to be dumped onto it.
Now there are a few reasons I picked the five I did. First, they were among the top 7-10 easiest to quickly skim and find information after reading the objective. They also (for the most part) backed up that objective. They were among the simplest too, not overloading my eyes or brain. The five I picked I felt had excellent use of bold, italics, and very nice alignment between columns and sections. It made the flow of information very smooth, almost pleasing. At first this task seemed pretty easy, I was eliminating resumes pretty quickly because I tend to be picky, but towards the end of the file I hit several resumes in a row that seemed really well put together and picking my five became pretty tough (thus why I listed a sixth one).
Personally for my own resume I'm going to go back and reorganize a little and also had some bolding and some italics because I see how much that helps move the eye. I am also going to try and rework some of my whitespace and possibly alter my objective to one that is more specific. This was a great assignment and I feel I really got a lot out of it.