How to write resumes for foreign jobs. (Us/Canada/Europe)

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Resume is essential part of job search however every market has adapted them a different way, some markets are more creative, some are most advanced and some now don’t even care about your resume as long as you have online presence.

Here I am talking about resumes for European, Australian and American countries who gets a lot of applications from all over the world and Recruiters need to choose best resumes for hiring manager, so they use scanning softwares to search for keywords, you might have seen website who can scan your resume and auto fill their form, but for this your resume should be in best shape.

Its obvious you should avoid spelling mistakes and don’t write false information.

Here I am dividing resume in sections.

Header

The common header should include your name (In bigger fonts and proper title casing), most preferable it should be centred on top

On left you can give your email and phone number, and on right you can write the date when resume was updated although this date is optional. Fonts should be same in complete resume and globally acceptable, many popular fonts in India might not be suitable for other places

Here is an example from my resume. You don’t need to write your exact address, city and country must be enough. If you have your website, linkedin url, it can be mentioned here as well.

Summary section

If you are an experienced person, your summary should say about your years of experience and field of work and summary of skills your bring on the table.

Example

I am a Senior Software Engineer at Rise People Canada. I am currently working with onsite team to create a common portal for all banking projects. I have 11+ years’ experience as a front-end developer. I am currently working on implementing micro frontend with lit elements. I also have experience with angular, react, web components, mobile app development, responsive web design, firebase and NodeJS.

You don’t need to write over optimistic targets here, just to mention here that how you are an asset for your next employer.

I also like to create a tag section of my skills on this part, so on one glance recruiters can see what are they buying

Work experience

This is most important section where you write about your key achievements and format of this section is very important to go into scanner. Latest work profile should come first

1. You must include your company name and duration of experience
2. First line should tell about your role and designation
3. Next few lines outlines a summary where keywords starts from “Implmented”, “Researched”, etc. Don’t write weak sentences here.
4. Last part should highlight tools and technologies used.

You keep on highlighting all the companies and projects to make sure there is no unwanted gap in your employment history.

Education

If you are from a very reputed institute with a glamorous academia, you can choose to take this section before work summary, otherwise just keeping one liner about your graduate/post graduate degree should be enough, writing percentage or cgpa is absolutely not required here for experienced people.

I am writing this one liner for years for educations

B.Tech in Electronics and Communication, 2011, JECRC, Jaipur

Awards and recognition

You might not need to mention every applause, but some glorified achievements can be discussed here like patents, client appreciation letters etc.

Publications

If you like to write journals or blogs related to your skill, you should give your links here.

If your are an open source contributor you can give link at both at header and in this section, since most of resumes now a days runs online , people like to click on these.

Is there a scope of creativity or funkiness here?

Absolutely, this is not the only way and there are much better formats in world, but this is what I found worked for me and it is simpler to maintain. I don’t use any colors or photographs, just pure texts in single font with titles in bold.

Also do not worry about number if pages as long as you are not repeating yourself or giving false information. Here is a screenshot that of my resume, which works in all scanners , you can text me if you need it in word format.