Hey everyone, as many of you know from another thread, my son is looking for an internship. He’s thinking resume bloat might be hindering him and is going to cut it to a single page. I pitched this question to an individual via PM, but I thought it would be helpful to open it to the group.
When reviewing lots of resumes, what information are you specifically hoping to find besides school, year, and major? What gets noticed? What gets a fast trip to the trash? Thanks!
GPA, student associations.
ANY spelling or grammatical errors are killers! One resume we got used “pore” instead of “pour” when referring to concrete placement. “Place” would have been better, anyway.
I am traveling so I,don’t have access to my file so see the link below for resume writing tips. My DD’s college and companies she has interviewed with have said no more than one page
Be sure to put linkin link at top by his address. Then college, relevant course work, honors, work expedience, activities then memberships and special skills. Also under address he should have an objective listed e.g. to find internship for summer 2016 etc.
Most prospective employers search job candidates online. He needs to search himself to make sure nothing comes up that he wouldn’t want a recruiter to see.
I don’t know what his resume is currently bloated with, but he should reduce it to show related experience (even if a project for school or on own), technical skills (software and programming), GPA (assuming over 3.0), Calculus and other relevant courses completed, academic honors and awards, leadership positions (including in sports), foreign languages, and a short list on one line stating interests including at least one sport, even if it is just hiking.
Basically anything from high school needs to go, unless for some reason there is great significance. For internships, employers generally only care about what you have accomplished while in college.
@mommyrocks the online search usually occurs only if a candidate makes it to one of the final rounds (i.e., the employer has already significantly narrowed down the candidate pool). If you were to look up some of my classmates, you would be surprised how many of them have pictures of underage drinking on their Facebook profiles. I know sorority girls who change their Facebook names to be their first name and middle name in hopes that employers don’t find them.
Besides major, school, and expected graduation date, the usual stuff on new graduate or intern resumes would be:
Thanks everyone!
I would hire interns for my company back in the day. What I was looking for in an intern’s resume was:
No more than one page. I wasn’t overly critical if it was over a page but I would question if the applicant was a little full of themselves.
@eyemgh I found some sample one page resumes on my laptop so if you pm me your email, I can send them to you.
why would you only hire rising seniors as interns? @HPuck35
For the company, internships are a trial period for an employee so that if they turn out to be lacking, the company can just not take them back after 3 months with little hassle. It makes little sense to offer an internship to someone who won’t be starting the year after as a full-time employee because that’s just a waste of 3 months of salary. The exception is if that student appears somehow exceptional and is worth trying to court early.
The primary reason for hiring only rising seniors was that the internship was basically a 2 - 3 month job interview. Also, the work we did required a higher skill level that someone below a rising senior would just not have had the classes and therefore the knowledge to be that useful.
A rising senior has the most coursework, including some of the meaty upperclassman courses. But there are companies that will hire a rising junior or even an occasional rising sophomore.
I also like to see a list of relevant software/programming languages the candidate is familiar with.
Senior level interns are more likely to be able to do some useful work where they can be evaluated as potential post-graduation hires.
Of course, willingness to hire interns at lower than senior level may depend on the field; in computing, the top CS majors below senior level may be sufficiently advanced in course work and have sufficient software development skill from both course work and self education that they can do useful work as interns. This is probably much less common in most engineering areas.
Of course there are companies out there that will consider less than a rising senior. It depends on the company and the field.
My company would get a large number of resumes, many times more than we could ever hire as interns. The company could afford to be picky as we only had so much budget to allocate to interns.
I once interviewed someone whose resume claimed to have written 200,000 lines of code in the Linux C Kernel… I think he counted header files recursively…
When I look at student LinkedIn pages, I’m intrigued by links to course project info, videos etc. (I don’t do any hiring myself … so not sure if it helps or not… it’s just an observation).
This brings me back to a question I have asked before. @NeoDymium. You say your company hires an intern the summer before senior year as an extended interview. Then if they don’t seem good, the company doesn’t have to worry about employing them when they graduate.
So your company is going to wait 9 months for a student to come back. Do they mostly come back? I mean don’t a number decide that they got some experience but actually don’t want to come back. That they don’t want to do that sort of engineering in the long run or they decide they want to move to another state.
Why don’t companies offer 2-3 month extended interview internships to new grads who can simply stay on in the fall. An offer of employment would hinge on success during the 2-3 month period. If they don’t work out, then let them go but if they do, then your company has someone who is already onboard.
Re: #18
Most people would choose a regular job instead of one that is explicitly a trial job if they had an option.