How do you tailor a resume when you have no experience?

Post Reply New Topic

Serious question.
I'm almost 20 and have never held a job.
My current resume lists volunteer work I've done for school credit at various points between the age of sixteen and eighteen (Habitat for Humanity, Library volunteer hours, Community theatre volunteer hours, volunteer work done for a World War II Veterans' History project) in addition to a few school programs I was involved in (Dance, Yearbook, Drama).
In all honesty it isn't too impressive a resume and probably won't get me hired. It was a huge burden to me during my most recent job issue, in which I not only stumbled and made a mess of a few of my interview questions, but also had the interviewer asking utterly irrelevant questions based on her misreading and misinterpreting my resume.
Also absent from my resume are references, because, well, I don't have any, or at least not any whose contact info I know and am able to give out.

What should I do to fix this and make my resume more polished and presentable?

Also add information about your desirable personality characteristics and skills. For instance, if you're proficient with PCs, or word processing, write that down. Also, you might want to look into resume writing workshops, or getting a professional 1:1 critique. At your local Employment Development Department center, they might have these services for free. You might also want to consider other job placement agencies. If you're autistic, or have a disability, you might want to look into services from the DOR (Department of Rehabilitation), which are free.
Anyway, when I attended the resume writing courses, one of the things that I've heard several times is to individualize each resume so that it has the exact same key words as the want adds. For instance, if you know how to do word processing for Windows and one add says they're looking for someone with experience with Microsoft Word, then you write down that you have experience with Microsoft Word on your resume. If someone else states it as wanting someone with experience with word processing, then you write down that you have experience with word processing on your resume. The reason for this is that the Human Resources professionals that search for qualified applicants have to go through 100's, maybe 1,000's of resumes, so they only pay attention to the ones that match their keyword searches.

Oh yeah, since you've been working as a student for a while, your future interviewees should probably be more understanding that you don't have work experience yet.

At 20, I'd not sweat too much.

What KIND of job are you trying for?

You have a lot of volunteer things, but the down side is that all of those activities are things you WANTED to do. It shows one side of you.

Employers also want to know how you do in a job that you don't really like. Most all jobs have good and bad parts to them. It's easy to do a job you love.

You should be working just to bring in a paycheck. Even if it's a low-paying entry-level job, having one for a few years shows you can stick with a consistent employer, and you can easily attest that the job has its ups and downs.

It doesn't matter whether you've been paid for the jobs or not, you did work.

So...

You need to start to clear out the volunteer bits. You don't need to use the word "volunteer", casual sounds better.

You need to provide examples of work that you did, ie: list specific duties - for example; what exactly did you do in the library? Check-in/out, searches, enquiries, shelf-checking etc. Do the same for your other jobs too.

Talk about initiatives you may have introduced. Ways you participated in a team and things that your brought to the job.

Finally, make contact with some people, they can be distant relatives (make sure that they have different names) and see if you can get them to provide phoned references for you. It's best if you've done some work for them but if not, then they can at least provide character references.