Would Appreciate any Resume Critiques

[SouthsideMike]

Just graduated and haven't had an interview since February. Changing my whole application approach and would love any resume critiques anyone could offer.

[Maine-iac]

OK.

1. Change "accomplishments" to "Exams". I'd move it above Education, myself, but that's optional. Move the honors degree part to the education section.

2. In the education section, showing your major gpa is fine, but I want your official gpa, too. If it's bad, some will disagree with this advice, but if I see a resume without it, I'm going to assume it stinks and not call you in, due to the dual strikes of it being bad, and the fact that you are hiding it. If it's bad, and you don't hide it, I MIGHT call you in anyway, since you do have some exams passed. Depends on how much competition you have and what their resumes look like. But if you have an honors degree, how bad can it be?

3. In the job section, can you mention anything you did to improve things for your team/company, rather than just list duties? (Improved sales performance, better department metrics, something like that?) You say you are team leader. Did you start out as something else? Since your work experience is rather thin, it wouldn't hurt to have it listed as something like "Sales Associate - May, 2007 to April, 2008, Team Leader - May, 2008 - August, 2009", indicating that they thought well enough of you to advance you. (Assuming of course, that this is the case.)

4. In the little league section, don't call them "kids". Use a non-slang term.

Good luck. Be sure to cast a wide net. As it looks now, it is a "meets minimum criteria" sort of resume, with nothing to really move it to the top of the pile, so you want to make sure it is sitting in a lot of piles to maximize your chances of getting interviews.

[TheShark]

Write your name with a smaller font to get a margin of at least 2.54 cm on top.

Move Exams before Education. Follow Education with Skills.

Reduce month names to 3 letters only.

No need to put 4.00 for GPA, it is assumed.

[alphatmw]

make your job bullets consistent in terms of verb/nouns.

noun - Daily customer interaction.
past tense verb - Developed departmental team building exercises.
present tense verb - Teach young kids the rules of the game

instead,

Interacted with customers daily
Developed...
Taught...

[Colonel Smoothie]

How proficient in Excel are you? It's vague on your resume what that means - a lot of people put "proficient" in Excel without really having worked with the software. If you are actually proficient, write down what projects you've used with Excel and be more descriptive about your abilities.

If you're not really proficient with Excel, you may get your ass handed to you in an interview when they ask you something basic like if you know how to automate pivot tables with VBA. If you can't come up with an answer you will automatically be put in the pool of rejects.

I think your resume is good enough for phone interview and I'd be surprised if you didn't get any. The more important thing you need to worry about is how well you do in the interview so look up the threads on that or tell us how your interviews go and we'll try to give you some advice.

As for the resume itself, you need work experience. You can make your resume as pretty looking and presentable as you want but if you don't get an internship you will be at a big disadvantage to people who do. So getting an internship is probably the easiest thing you can do to improve your resume.

[vjvj]

Looks to me that your side margins are also small. And there doesn't appear to be a good reason for it. It looks like you could easily set up a standard margin without any wrapping occurring.

I would keep all text at least 11 font. It think you're only using smaller in the header?

Don't use italics, as it is harder to read.

Use bullets instead of dashes, as they look better.

Don't put periods at the end of lines. You're doing it sometimes (but not always).

Put Exams above Education. It's way easier to read an exam section that's in tabular form, I think. If it is in tabular form, you can generally see all the information at a glance. This one has to be read carefully to get how many exams you passed and when.

And definitely don't use the unusual and hard to read date form - "July of 2009". "Jul 2009" is way easier to read IMO.

Some people think scores are great and all that. But the way you've got it makes it harder to read and I think making it easier to read is much more likely to help than an 8 and a 9.

I'd abbreviate B.S., as it is easier to read.

I'd get the GPA of the right margin. If you abbreviate B.S., it will probably be OK after the degree.

Don't put the location on the right margin, either. It fits nicely after the company name.

I wouldn't bother with the customer interaction bullet. It really is obvious.

I'd call it Computer Skills.

The Clubs part is very hard to read because of the lack of separation between the two things listed. "Member" isn't particularly impressive.

And, yeah, the best change you could make is to try to use results-oriented bullets.

[SouthsideMike]

Thank you all for the comments they were very helpful.