Know Which Resume Type Suits You Best

Find out which of these resume styles suits most your particular job-seeker profile.

Don’t take your resume for granted! Any job-hunter worth his salt knows a good resume is the key to a job interview and, ultimately, to employed status. Aside from being a summary of abilities, experience and education, a resume should reveal your unique selling point to make a potential employer want to get to know you better.

The secret of an irresistible resume -- it is suited to a specific job offer and addresses the position’s requirements. A tailored resume carries more impact than a one-size-fits-all.

If your resume is in need of a makeover, the first step to take is to organize information under specific headings such as education, work experience, honors, skills and activities. When you have it all on paper, decide on the proper resume format to play up outstanding qualities that make a perfect fit for the job opening. Take a look at the different kinds of resumes below and choose the one that suits your particular job-hunter profile:


This format is the most conventional and puts emphasis on an itemized employment history. A job seeker’s career milestones are presented in reverse chronological order, starting with the current or last position held. Each position should contain a description of responsibilities and a few bullet points of accomplishments.

This resume type is best for candidates with solid experience and progressive job history in a field or industry. It lends itself well to those with accumulated work experience relevant to the job offered and who want to continue along a similar career path.

Below is the suggested format, but be sure to customize it according to the job’s requirements:

Objective
Summary
Employment History
Education
Professional affiliations

Community Affiliations

Resume authorities agree that most employers prefer this resume style because it is based on facts and is easily digestible. It clearly demonstrates at a glance your career movements and progress over the years.


The functional resume is one that organizes work history into sections that highlight areas of skill and accomplishment. This resume variety allows candidates to give prominence to the set of skills and experiences they deem most relevant to the position. It may be a good choice for job hoppers, career changers and fresh graduates.

Job hoppers can use it to help make sense of seemingly disconnected experiences and show correlation between skills and accomplishments not made obvious in a traditional chronological format.

On the other hand, career shifters and recent graduates can utilize this resume type to display transferable skills and related achievements to convince employers of their suitability for the post.

This resume type often takes this format:

Objective
Summary
Skill Areas
Employment History
Education
Professional Affiliations

Community Affiliations

Be warned, however, that a functional resume could raise concerns that it hides information gaps and covers up spotty employment records. Employers might also encounter difficulties matching skills and accomplishments with actual job titles, dates and responsibilities. To avoid this, include the company name in the bulleted description of your accomplishments. Moreover, don’t omit at least a brief chronological listing of your work experience in your functional resume.


As the term implies, the combination resume tries to merge the best features of both chronological and functional types -- incorporating both a chronological work history and a skills and achievements section.

In this format, skills and accomplishments get top billing followed by employment history.

However, experts caution that the combination resume may not sit well with some employers, who may find these longer resumes particularly repetitious and confusing. This format can be a good tool, however, for someone who possesses strong editing skills.

Curriculum vitae

The curriculum vitae is sometimes used interchangeably with resume. But by formal definition, curriculum vitae refers to a detailed, lengthy and structured outline of educational background, publications, projects, awards and work history. It could run up to 20 pages and is usually suitable for educators and scientists boasting extensive academic and professional credentials and seeking positions in education or research.

Here is the recommended format for the curriculum vitae:

Education
Publications
Projects
Awards
Employment History

Electronic resume

Simply put, the electronic resume is one that can be sent by e-mail or on the Internet, and is specially formatted for scanning and searching by optical scanning systems. This format is the one frequently used when sending resumes through electronic resume banks and job sites like JobStreet.com.

The electronic resume can come in different file formats, but experts recommend the use of ASCII (or American Standard Code for Information Interchange) file formats as they are universally recognized by PC, Macintosh, UNIX workstations and mainframe terminals. The three most common ASCII (pronounced ASK-ee) file formats are plain text, rich text and hypertext.

Each format has its own advantages and disadvantages. Plain text is the most popularly used format for resume transfers across computer systems and is identified by the .txt file extension. Its main drawback is, of course, its no-frills, plain-look format, which can be remedied with the use of asterisks and other special characters to achieve a bulleted effect.

Rich text, identified by the .rtf file extension, provides more formatting options and is gaining grounds for its compatibility across word processors. Rich text is very convenient to use for existing resumes that are in word document or are sent as an email attachment. However, some destination computers may have email browsers that do not recognize this file format. If you are unsure about the read capability of a recipient’s e-mail system, you would do better applying plain text formatting.

Hypertext, also known as a web page, is identified through the file extension .htm or .html. This file format requires a web browser (like Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) to view your resume. A major setback to hypertext resume is that it relies on self-promotion rather than on the support of a large recruitment site.