We’ve thrown a lot of resume advice into the world with past blog posts, but sometimes what you need is the most basic elements in order to get started. There’s no sense in teaching you how to organize your information when there’s no information to organize. So, to take us back to basics, here’s a simple overview of some casual resume advice.

Figure Out What’s Important

The best resume advice is also the simplest. Know what matters. If you’ve just graduated with a law degree and served internships at law firms every year, do you think it’s really that important to mention that summer freshman year you spent at McDonald’s?

Skills include: Rockin’ the headscarf.

The other reason to figure out the most relevant information in your history is that it allows you to understand what does and doesn’t need to be expanded. Logically, your newest, most recent jobs and projects should have the most detail put into them, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes the job you had before this one is much more relevant to what you want the next one to be. This basic resume advice allows you to prioritize your history, so your readers can see what takes priority.

Be Brief, But Detailed.

This resume advice is a little more complicated depending on how specialized your job is, but the point is basically this: Don’t just assume that your readers will automatically know what you did just based on your job title. It doesn’t matter if you think what you did as a Systems Administrator is “Stuff a systems administrator does,” you still need to provide details and descriptors of your responsibilities. Your employers are looking to see what you know, as well as what level of workload you can handle. Saying exactly what you did with specific information, like numbers, gives them a better idea of that.

Give Yourself Some Credit

One of the biggest problems with giving anyone resume advice  is that people don’t think what they do every day is anything special. Of course you don’t, you do it every day. But if you actually make a list of what your daily duties and responsibilities are, then incorporate important details like who you work in collaboration with, suddenly you’ve got a document listing all your knowledge, experience, and abilities — Well, look at that, you’ve made yourself a resume!

Basic resume advice can give you a good resume. But to get a great one takes a little more effort and focus that you may not be able to provide while looking at it from the inside. That’s where we come in. We can take the good document you create from this simple resume advice and transform it to an eye-catching tribute to your awesomeness.