It’s always job hunting season and I wanted to leave you with five great tips to having an effective resume.

1) A one page resume is key. Too often people attempt to put all of their experience on the entire resume and it ends up being two or three pages. As a prospective employer, a one page resume is a positive step. If your experience and skills must run over one page, two pages is the absolute maximum but I do not recommend it.

2) Absolutely zero mispellings. No excuse. Proofread your resume and have an honest friend proofread it for you as well. In addition, make sure you explain any anacronyms that are part of company cultures that you include on your resume. Spell them out first and then you can use them a second or third time.

3) Include timely, accurate and pertinent information within the resume. For example, I highly recommend including your own personal Linkedin URL, twitter address, and a personal blog address within the address portion of the resume. Make sure that the blog is professional in the appearance and content because many employers will look at the blog several times during the interviewing process. Also, make sure that your LinkedIn profile is 100% complete and up to date. If you include your twitter address, remember to make sure your tweets are professional and don’t turn into R-rated tweets. You never know when your future boss is watching you tweet (even at 1 AM in the morning after a long night out!).

**Bonus tip** Use your Google Voice number as your phone number on the resume. This will allow you to know when it isn’t a friend calling you to go out on the town. Plus it shows some subtle technical expertise which is always a good thing.

4) Emphasize important accomplishments, statistics and awards with bold text within your resume. There is no need to go overboard, but with subtly placed bold text in various places within a resume, this will subconsciously draw the interviewer’s attention to specific facts that you view as “must see” within the resume.

5) Find a way to display your personality somewhere within the resume. In my opinion, the hobbies and activities section is perfect for this. Community activities, interesting hobbies and association memberships are great talking points for building rapport within an interview. In general, I would avoid using colorful paper with lots of “bedazzlement” unless the type of job you are applying for calls for it. There is no need for your resume to be thrown away without even being examined.
There are my five tips for writing an effective resume. Stay tuned for part 2. Are there any suggestions you would like to add?