HOW TO PRESENT YOUR RESUME
Most resumes are not much more than a collection of "evidence," various facts about your past. By evidence, we mean all the mandatory information you must include on your resume: work history with descriptions, dates, education, affiliations, list of software mastered, etc. If you put this toward the top of your resume, anyone reading it will feel like they are reading an income tax form. Let's face it, this stuff is boring no matter how extraordinary you are. All this evidence is best placed in the second half of the resume. Put the hot stuff in the beginning, and all this less exciting information afterward.
We divided the resume into a "hot" assertions section, and a more staid "evidence" section for the sake of communicating that a great resume is not information but advertising. A great resume is all one big assertions section. In other words, every single word, even the basic facts about your history, are crafted to have the desired effect, to get them to pick up the phone and call you. The decisions you make on what information to emphasize and what to de-emphasize should be based on considering every word of your resume to be an important part of the assertions section. The evidence includes some or all of the following:
