There are 5 major types of resumes: the chronological resume, functional Resume, combination resume, target resume and mini resume. Every type has its place in the hiring process and may be useful to you at some point in your career.

A chronological resume is a brief run through of your working history according to when you held the position. With this resume, jobs are always supposed to be listed in reverse chronological order. Start with the most recent activity and then work back from there. This makes your career path logical and readable. Put your most important information at the top to make it easy to find. It will also most likely be your most impressive assignment. Keep in mind employers take the closest look at your more recent employment activity as a gauge for how you are going to work in the future. This is generally the preferred method by hiring managers.

A functional resume does not focus as heavily on when you did your activities, but rather what you did. It focuses on clusters of experience you’ve gained from multiple projects. This lets you keep the focus off employment gaps you may have, or a career path that is not clearly heading toward this job opening.

A combination resume is a hybrid of functional and chronological. It outlines the skills that you posses and  relates them to time periods of past employment.

A targeted resume simply means not creating one generic resume to send out to the masses. With a targeted resume, you take the time to tweak it to put you in the best light to get hired by a particular company. It is a good idea to take a target approach when putting together any other type of resume. While it may save you time to create one and send it out, you will get better results if you tailor your resume to each potential employer.

A mini resume is rarely used in hiring settings. Many times these are a short synopsis of your working history sometimes in the form of a bio, often with some supplemental information requested. They are supposed to be short and to the point, so that when someone meets you quickly, they can get a feel for your experience.

Keep in mind that the resume is a major part of your offline brand. In essence, a resume is your personal brand built into one nice neat page. For this reason you need to spend more time on this than anything else. Don’t leave resume building and brainstorming until the night before your college career fair. Give it to people, get feedback and never stop building your brand.

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