How to Write a Resume As a Career Starter

Everyone needs to start their career somewhere. Having a solid resume is essential for a strong workforce debut. Here we examine how a career starter can write an effective resume despite limited work experience.

By Lora Korpar

Entering the workforce can be scary. You have to navigate a job search that values experience when you have little to none. The struggle is greater when your resume is not optimized for success.

So how do you break out of the search-and-rejection cycle? A resume overhaul is a good first step.

“Your resume needs to tell your story in a clear and concise format, and it has to relate your qualifications and your accomplishments to the job that you're applying to,” said Lesley Mitler, a career coach and co-founder of Early Stage Careers.

Resume writing is difficult even for people with decades-long careers. But it is possible to have a strong resume without a long work experience section.

I spoke with Mitler and career coach and resume writer Matt Warzel to discuss the components of a strong, entry-level resume and how to structure a resume to downplay a lack of experience.

Compensating for Lack of Experience

An initial question a career starters ask when writing a resume is, “How do I account for my lack of experience?”

Mitler says you can address this in two ways – gaining more knowledge and increasing the emphasis on your experience.

You can also gain more knowledge by receiving additional certifications, joining industry groups, or landing an internship during or after college.

“Any upskilling that you can do to demonstrate that you have the relevant skills to do a job [helps],” Mitler said. “Certifications will give an employer a sense of your level of knowledge in a particular area. [And finding an internship] will get you the business experience you need for a full-time position.”

Present your knowledge and experience by moving points of emphasis higher in the resume.

“Always put education upfront if it's an early career [resume], because most of the time that's what they're using as a lot of their arsenal for that experience or that transferability,” Warzel said.

Warzel also said career starters should be realistic about their career goals.

“Be pragmatic about what opportunities are in front of you that might be viable,” Warzel said. “Transferability is the key. Figure out what you've done that can be [comparable to] what the hiring team is expecting of a quality candidate.”

Career Starter Resume Formatting

The resume should be visually appealing and concise. Warzel said no hard-and-fast rule on page count exists, but most entry-level resumes do not need to be long.

“I would just say don't bore the person,” Warzel said. “If you have three pages, there better be some juice on page three… Maybe they got started with some sort of family business or managed to parlay a bunch of internships. But the majority of the time if you're early-career, one page should suffice because the audience is not going to expect you to have too much coming at them.”

Mitler says not to make the text too small and to use a font that is easy to read. Also, leave enough whitespace “so your eye can move down the page seamlessly.”

“The average recruiter spends six to 10 seconds looking at a resume,” Mitler said. “You want to make sure they can take in the depth of your background in that time and be more enticed to take a harder second look at it.”

Mitler also said to stay away from lines stretching across the page. This will tell your eyes the line is a stopping point, lessening the likelihood of a hiring manager reading further. Instead, underline and space out sections.

Mitler said to list sections based on their relevance to the job you are applying for. For example, a recent college graduate who doesn’t have industry experience but participated in training and school organizations would prioritize the education and skills sections.

“A lot of people like to be sort of democratic in how they lay out their resumes, so every job or experience will have three bullet points. But I think what you have to look at is what are the most relevant experiences that you have, and those have to look more robust,” Mitler said. “Look at what you want a potential employer to focus on and make sure you build out that experience the most extensively.”

Entry-Level Resume Content

In addition to moving the education section higher, Mitler recommends recent college graduates give a “full 360 view” of their academic experience. Leave room for school honors, awards, leadership and activities. You can even describe what you learned in coursework if it is relevant to the job. Also, list your GPA unless it was below a 3.0.

Include the classic resume sections like contact information, skills and work experience, but focus them around education and extracurriculars if you lack industry experience. Whether you include a professional summary is a judgment call because arguments for and against it exist.

Mitler said a professional summary is unnecessary if you don’t have much experience. She recommends linking to a website and LinkedIn profile instead because those platforms provide more space to express yourself.

“The most valuable real estate is at the top of the resume,” Mitler said. “That's going to get somebody's attention to keep reading. If you put a professional summary in it, you're taking a lot of real estate up and as an entry-level person, I don't think you have a whole lot to say. I think you're better off just using the space to get into the tactical parts.”

However, Warzel said the professional summary is the perfect place to advocate for yourself when you’re “clutching at straws” in the work experience section.

“A summary is a great way to tell the hiring team ‘Here's my value offering,’ ‘Here's why I'm worth paying every couple of weeks to do something and why I'm pretty darn good at it,’” Warzel said. “If you can get them to understand why you're the Tylenol to their pain points, why you're their problem-solver, in the least amount of words possible, they're going to be interested.”

The skills section is especially important for those with limited experience. Mitler and Warzel said to pack a career starter resume with hard skills and sprinkle soft skills into other sections like work experience or the professional summary. The reader will look for skills more concrete than “strong communicator” if the experience section is lacking.

“If you're going to talk about being a time manager, having great communication skills, that stuff is appealing, but you don't need to make that a highlight like a hard skill has to be highlighted,” Warzel said.?

“[Soft skills] are very subjective, and obviously, they should be communicated somewhere, especially if you're lucky enough to get an interview because that’s where you can explain and demonstrate it,” Mitler added. “But I don't think it really adds value in a resume just to list something without support.”

Changing the Resume for the Job

A successful resume is tailored to the job you are looking for. However, you don’t have to rewrite the entire resume for each job application.?

Examine keywords in the resume and compare them to the job description. Ensure the top responsibilities listed in the description appear in the resume. And if the wording is different in the job description, tweak the resume to use the employer’s language.

“I'm a big advocate of reverse-engineering off of job descriptions,” Warzel said. “You want to start filtering in some of the jargon and tasks that they have on that job description.”

However, Warzel said to avoid copying and pasting the job description. Instead, focus on describing the outcomes you produced using the skills in the job description.

“Copy/pasting is boring, and it's not personable,” Warzel said. “What was the cause and effect? Give me an outcome. Give me a little anecdote of how you were able to [use] these skills they're trying to relate to. And now you can use that as a springboard during the interview because I always say you're presenting the resume as a full meal and then the interview is when you talk about the ingredients.”

Warzel added that having a firm grasp of your career goals is vital to building an effective resume.

“Most people get a job, the lucky ones get a career and the very fortunate ones get a calling,” Warzel said. “And if you can just get to that career point, you can get more satisfaction in your life… Figure out what is motivating you personally and professionally, and then start to align how you can get to that point.”

Top Takeaways

Writing an entry-level resume

• Compensate for lack of experience by highlighting education and skills. Also, upskill whenever possible.
• Formatting should stay at one page in most cases, but still, leave ample whitespace to make the resume more readable.
• Recent college graduates should expand on the education section by highlighting the skills they learned in their coursework and extracurricular activities.
• Focus on hard skills in the skills section. Insert soft skills into other sections to show the concrete ways you implemented them.
• Compare the resume and job description to determine which keywords to add to the resume.