You want to make a great first impression.

It may be your first full-time job, but you have strengths, skills, and potential.

You have something to offer.

You know it. So prove it.

I’ll help you.

Preparing to Write Your First Job Résumé

It’s crucial for your first job resume to look professional.

To make this happen, you have some preparation to do. Invest the time and energy it takes to do this right.

When you’re successful, you’ll get an interview, and hopefully a job.

Those are the stakes. Let’s get ready.

Sections of Your Résumé

Before you can start writing, you must know what you’re going to write. Makes sense, yes?

Below are the sections in your first job resume. You can pick and choose those that best highlight your skills and experience, but the more you can include, the better and more professionally ready you will appear.

Your first job résumé should be no longer than one page. Be concise. Don’t include every detail of your life, just those parts that your potential boss would care about.

Think about the job you want and use your resume to make the argument that you’re the right person for the job.

Résumé Sections

1. Objective: Write a brief statement that includes:

  • Your career goals.
  • What you hope to achieve in this, your first job.

2. Education: This section shows your academic background.

  • Institutions you've attended.
  • The degrees you’ve earned.
  • Your majors.
  • Relevant courses.

3. Experience: This is the key category. You should include any work experiences where you've gained skills relevant to the job you're applying for.

  • Internships.
  • Part-time jobs.
  • Completed or ongoing projects.

4. Skills: List examples of your soft and hard skills which are relevant to the job description.

Soft Skills:

  • Communication
  • Teamwork
  • Problem-solving
  • Adaptability
  • Leadership

Hard Skills:

  • Data analysis
  • Computer programming
  • Graphic design
  • Foreign language proficiency
  • Project management

5. Awards and Certifications: If you’ve earned any special recognitions, now is the time to display them. Include anything that demonstrates your competence, skills, or achievements.

6. Projects: Think about times you’ve been involved with others in a useful project role. Being a team member and contributing to its success is a powerful indication that you are qualified to work for pay.

You may have participated in a wide variety of projects:

  • Senior thesis or Capstone
  • Community service
  • Musical or theater production
  • Club project
  • Research project

7. Volunteer Work: This section deals specifically with work you’ve done without pay or compensation of any kind. This is particularly impressive if you have no formal work experience.

  • Habitat for Humanity builder.
  • Food Bank assistant.
  • Tutoring
  • Hospital volunteer.
  • Elder care

Writing Your First Job Résumé

Choose a neat and professional format

As a beginner, you want a résumé format that best showcases your strengths.

There are two formats I recommend for a first résumé. Choose the format that best highlights your abilities and professionalism.

  • A Chronological format, which focuses on the path you took to get to where you are now. Write your experiences in reverse chronological order, listing the most recent first and then proceeding backward in time.
  • A Functional format highlights your skills. Showcase what you can do rather than when you did it. This format downplays any gaps you may have in your employment history. It’s especially powerful for recent grads.

Draft each section

Based on your choice of format, plan the overall structure of your résumé. Now, choose the sections you wish to include and the order you want them to appear.

Write a complete first draft

With a list of the sections nearby, write the first complete draft of your résumé.

Don’t labor over it too much because you’ll be reviewing and rewriting it. It’s much better to simply get your facts down in the proper order without worrying about each individual word. You can polish it up later.

Review and revise

Here is my best advice for making your resume sound smooth and impressive. Try it.

  1. With your first draft in hand, read it aloud.
  2. When something doesn’t sound right, change it.
  3. Repeat this process until you have a final draft that you’re proud of.

Proofread, proofread, proofread

When you’re satisfied with your final draft, you now need to make sure it’s perfect on the page.

  1. Proofread it several times, making tiny changes and fixing typos.
  2. Have someone else read it to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
  3. Proofread it again, just to make sure.

Customize your résumé for every different job application

Once you have an excellent first job résumé to share, you’re not done. Sorry, but you want a job, right? Keep working.

Gone are the days when a single résumé was handed out with every prospective job application.

For every job you apply to, you need to create:

  1. a customized résumé tailored specifically for that company’s job description
  2. a cover letter (which we haven’t discussed in this article)
  3. a follow-up thank you email to send the following day.

Yes. I agree. That’s a lot of time and effort. But you’re in luck.

Automating the Job Application Process

Since the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence), it’s been possible to tailor résumés, cover letters, and follow-up emails using AI automation. This has enormous benefits, as you can guess.

Our service, aiapply.com, exists to automate the entire job search process, including tailored application documents.

You upload your new job résumé, tell aiapply where to find the job description online or copy-paste it into a form, then hit the “Generate Application Kit” button.

That’s it.

In a few moments, you get a résumé, cover letter, and follow-up email custom-tailored to the job description you supplied.

What you don’t realize yet, is that your résumé will also be formatted to pass the scrutiny of the ATS (Applicant Tracking System).

The ATS pre-scans your application, résumé, and cover letter to see if you’re a good match for the job description. If the computer doesn’t find a match, your application is rejected before a human even reads it.

That’s the world we live in now.

But you can take advantage of aiapply’s powerful AI system to defeat the ATS, tailor your résumé to the job, and be 80% more likely to get hired.

Not bad. And you can try it out for free.

Visit aiapply.com today and see for yourself.