We all need one; we’ve most all got one; we may not be as proud of it as we should be, but we’d better do a good job spinning ours if we want to get ahead. I’m talking, of course, about the resume. If you’ve never had to make a resume (pox on your house) then either you’re too young or too, too unlike the rest of the world to understand what a toilsome job it is deciding what should stay and what should go.

Of course you should always tell the truth on your resume (is what I meant to say) However if you find yourself lucky in love, lucky in life, yet unlucky in the job hunt, you may want to consider exactly what’s on your resume, the layout and design of said resume, and figure where your life falls on this one piece of paper (or Word doc) that means so much.

First of all, when considering your resume layout, it’s a good idea to put your most recent work experience at the top. Including the dates worked can be helpful for the employer but aren’t always necessary, particularly if you’ve got good references from said employer.

There are a few preclusions to this rule; one is obviously if you’ve been fired and/or told that “you’ve got no references from this company.” Then, probably, no matter how relevant this work experience is, you wouldn’t want to include it as direct work experience. You can list in below your jobs in “special skills” – like “spent two years interning at JFK Airport control towers,” if, what happened in actuality is that you worked at the control towers for two years but were fired for falling asleep in the towers and planes started dropping like flies into the Atlantic; or that plane wings clipped the towers due to your negligence.

If that’s the case, actually, you might want to not put that work experience on your resume and consider a new career.

Your resume is what gets you in the door so you should consider what’s on the resume before you submit it. Put another way, what would get you to hire you? What can you offer this company that sets you apart from others? This is also a key part of your cover letter; but your work experience, references, personal contacts, and special skills should be all that they need to see. Often time’s cover letters aren’t even read (especially if they’re LONG!) I’ve done some hiring and a concise, neat, accurate resume beats a lengthy cover letter 9 times out of 10.

Accuracy in your resume is relative; as I said there may be some information you don’t want to include, some jobs you don’t want to put on, which is fine! That’s totally your prerogative. I would very much suggest that you do not include jobs that show a decrepit moral character (i.e. – you stole from the company) or jobs where you were summarily dismissed from. Also spell check is essential! You don’t want your future employer to have formed an opinion of you (you’re illiterate) before you’ve even walked through the door and just because you type too fast!

Samples of what I’m talking about are available all over. If you’re looking for sample resumes, resume templates, or free resume examples you can find them all across your computer. Templates are available on most operating systems and if you don’t find one that you like you can just key in “resume samples” into a search engine and no doubt turn up hundreds of thousands of hits.

Resume writing is an art hopefully most of us never need to master. If you do a good job at all your jobs, keep them a relatively lengthy amount of time, progress through a companies ranks, get recruited by other companies, until next thing you know, you’re CEO of some big conglomerate, congratulations! You’ve done everything correct. However, for most of the rest of the world, we stumble, we fall, we make mistakes, we amend those mistakes, and we need to document it along the way. A resume is the embodiment of our work life, on an 8 ½ x 11” piece of paper; how does your page read? A work to be proud of? Or a comedic farce?