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How to Write a Resume

The resume is an integral part of any application process, providing information about your educational and professional background and summarizing your experience and skills. It is therefore all the more important that all formalities are taken into account and that no important aspects are omitted. Here is a quick overview of what you need to take into account.

Read the job posting carefully

Before writing your resume, you should take a close look at the job you are applying for. Use as many keywords as possible from the job ad. The more similarities you can find in the job you are applying for, the more likely you are to get the job you are looking for.

Headline

Your resume can be headlined Resume First Name & Last Name, which is one to two font sizes larger than the information that follows. If writing a multi-page resume, it may also make sense to move the title to the header so that it is automatically carried over to the other pages.

Personal information

After that, all the necessary personal information is mentioned:

• First name, last name

• Address (street, house number, postal code, city)

• Contact information (e-mail and phone number)

It is important to note that your personal information is correct and your phone number, as well as the e-mail address are up to date. The e-mail address should sound serious and not contain a fantasy name. Information such as date/place of birth, nationality, marital status and denomination are personal details that are outdated. These, as well as information about parents or the profession of relatives, are not given nowadays, because after all it is about your resume.

Professional photo

You are not obliged to use a photo in your resume. However, if you decide to use a photo, make sure that it is not a passport photo, homemade picture or a full body shot and that the background is neutral.

Form

There are different forms for the resume, which serve as the basic building block of your resume. It is often differentiated into:

• Tabular resume

• Chronological resume

• Detailed resume

The tabular resume is the most uncomplicated and most commonly used form and, due to its tabular structure, is particularly well suited to presenting your own career in a quick, orderly overview. On the left-hand side of the page you will find the dates and on the right-hand side the individual stations.

Structure

Since recruiters often have little time to review incoming applications, your resume should not exceed the maximum number of three A4 pages and should be clearly structured. Several small sections with subheadings and important information made visible with a paragraph ensure that a clear structure emerges from the resume. So, after you have provided your personal information, you can move on to the next section.

Professional background

This section is considered the heart of your resume and presents your professional career to date in antichronological order and without gaps. This means that you first name the most current station and from this point you go back further and further to past practical experiences (jobs/internships). It is best to use a consistent pattern. For example, you could indicate the time on the left, the stations on the right and below that, in bullet points, the most important information about your workplace, employer, company headquarters, legal form and your tasks & responsibilities. It is also advisable to write a few bullet points or a few short sentences for each professional station in order to mention relevant details. Especially for more general job titles, such as project manager or consultant, it is advisable to go into more detail about the actual activities. In general, the focus should be on relevant work experience. Therefore, you should focus on the most important stations. Particularly side jobs that you had during school or studies become less important as your work experience progresses, and should be described less extensively or possibly even omitted altogether. Make sure that you mainly mention the professional stations that are relevant for the advertised position.

Educational background

If you have mentioned all your professional experiences and have arrived at your school education, you can describe your school career in this section. In addition, you also have space here to mention stays abroad or further education. If you now look at your professional career and your school career, then at best there should be no gaps in time. However, if you notice that one or the other position does not have a connection point, this is no reason to worry: Be honest and describe (if you feel comfortable with it) how this gap came about. Reasons such as parental leave, world trip, sabbatical are all plausible and accepted by modern HR departments. But also a sabbatical for private/medical reasons is something you can put on your CV nowadays and is usually respected by HR managers. Ask yourself what exactly the reader needs to read from your resume and mention your strengths and experiences when describing your professional career and the respective stations.

Special skills

In this section, you can list other relevant, miscellaneous skills. These include:

• foreign language skills (preferably with the language level you have reached)

• IT skills

• driver's license

• awards

• social commitment

• honorary positions

Interests & Hobbies

Stating hobbies and interests are optional, but still a good way to express one's personality a bit. In addition, soft skills can also indirectly come from some activities from leisure time, for example, the ability to work in a team from team sports, so such an indication can also be useful.

Place, date, signature

Finally, you confirm the truthfulness of the information you have provided with a handwritten signature. If your application is online, you can simply scan your signature and insert it as an image in your resume.

Authenticity of the information

If you lie on your resume, you risk not only termination without notice, but even a lawsuit for fraudulent misrepresentation and thus committing contract fraud. You should therefore carefully check all the information you have provided and always be aware that personnel officers may check your professional background, for example by calling your previous employer.

Here again everything at a glance:

• Personal information

• Professional career

• Educational background

• Special skills

• Interests and hobbies

• Place, date, signature

Revise your resume

If you think that it is enough to create a perfect resume once and use it for all application processes, we are sorry to disappoint you. Your resume should be revised for each application and adapted to the respective job. A resume rarely fits two job offers and should therefore have a relation to the job.

Grammar and spelling

Even if this tip seems a little superfluous, this aspect should be considered in any case, because for many companies it is an exclusion criterion. For this reason, it is advisable to have your resume proofread by others.

Choose a simple file name

Make sure to use a simple file name in the format First Name Last Name, Resume, Year and separate the individual words with a hyphen, so that your file name is easy to read and your application can be found again quickly.

Extra tip

To make your CV or your entire application even more convincing, we have an exclusive tip for a convincing application: You could enclose the CASE certificate. The CASE Score measures your academic performance with the help of large data sets in comparison with your direct fellow students. This results in the so-called CASE Score, which has proven to be a tool for fair assessment of applicants' performance. The CASE Score is already used by a large number of companies and applications with a CASE Score are welcomed.

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