In our last blog, we looked at how pre-planning will help you get the most out of a job fair. Your pre-planning should include knowing the route to the event, making sure your clothes are appropriate, having a rehearsed elevator pitch, and coming equipped with plenty of copies of a great resume. Your resume should be free of typographical errors, that’s a given, but there a couple of other important things to keep in mind when handing out your resume at a job fair.
Save The Trees
When writing your resume, keep in mind that it is in fact a resume, and not the great American novel. Yes, you may have a ton of experience and want to make sure it is all captured on paper for a hiring manager, but you can still do this in one or two pages. Any more than two can get cumbersome. If you are having trouble deciding what to cut, this article from The Ladders suggests “shaving from the bottom” and “delving into the oldest parts of the resume to trim down or even eliminate the most out-of-date elements.” Speaking of resumes with multiple pages, this leads us to…
Keeping It Together
At our recent job fair in Orlando, we received over 160 resumes. Most of these resumes had multiple pages. We also had applicants fill out a candidate information sheet. With all this paper flying around, it was very easy for resume pages to get shuffled and even lost. If you have multiple pages of a resume, this problem is solved easily with a paper clip. I might stay away from stapling, as some recruiters will need to scan your resume into their applicant tracking system, and staples add extra work. A paper clip is useful because if there is anything else the recruiter needs to pair with the resume (like a business card or, in our case, a candidate information sheet), it is easily attached.
Stay Consistent
Staying consistent is true for the formatting and font choices on your resume, but also for your paper size. Standard copy paper is 8.5″ by 11″ and is a great size for a resume. If you are doing a standard resume, and not something creative or outside the box, make sure to stick to 8.5″ by 11″. We actually got a few resumes that were printed on legal paper, which is 8.5″ by 14″. These resumes ended up getting folded to fit in our portable files.
Who Does This Belong To?
Our last job fair resume tip is to make sure your name and contact information is easily accessible and legible at the top of your resume. Some of the resumes we saw had names and contact information in very small font sizes. You do not need to bump up your font size to 75, but your name and contact information should be found upon first glance of the resume.
Follow these resume tips for your job fair resume, and you will stand out to a hiring manager for all the right reasons.
Images courtesy of phasinphoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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