I'm kinda going through this myself, ie, the resume rewrite, and contemplating career opps.
I have a friend who told me a while back that he's managed to really refine his resume through quite a few iterations over the years while applying some guidelines. He agreed to review mine and help me to refine it. After looking at it, he provided me with some must-haves and must-not-haves, as well as some general guidelines. What follows is more or less what I took away from that.
I already had a pretty generous clue that it needed to have some of the fat trimmed. It is (or was, before I started down this path) several pages long, and followed this format:
- name / phone / email / location (city/state, not full address, to keep it uncluttered)
- professional summary
- employment history (reverse chronological order)
- skills/technologies
- education
I ended up rearranging the sections above, and making huge cuts to the content. The revised order is now this:
- name / phone / email / location (city/state, not full address, to keep it uncluttered)
- professional summary
- skills/technologies
- employment history (reverse chronological order)
- education
This doesn't look like much of a change, but bear with me. My skills/technologies section was excessive, it didn't provide the reader any at-a-glance info. It was pretty much a summary of just about any technology I'd ever touched. And I've been in this game a long while. So instead of sprawling on for 1-1.5 pages, it's now a 3-column table with exceptionally brief mentions of technology that I want to emphasize or feel I've got a fairly substantial amount of time invested. I even played with including/omitting the bullets/indentation, as I wanted to keep it crisp looking.
My friend pointed out that using ALL CAPS in resumes is a no-no. I'd never heard of this one before, but I wasn't too attached to the ALL CAPS, which I'd been using for the names of the employers. I also changed my name at the top to be mixed case.
He also had me change the format of each individual job entry. What I used to have would have looked like this:
ACME CORPORATION 03/1997 to 07/2000
City, State
Position Title
- Did a bunch of these duties
- Did a bunch of these other duties
- Wrote up a clever report saving the company money
- Possible mention of technologies/specialized skills used
and after the revision it now follows this format:
Position Title (parenthetical extra possibly useful very brief position clarification)
Acme Corporation, City, State
03/1997 to 07/2000
- Top team player leading most problems solved for all of 1999
- Wrote up a clever report saving the company money
Technologies/specialized skills used: brief listing of those ones I want to remember/emphasizeOf course, I tweaked the fonts a bit for the position title, so that it would stand out above the rest of the info, moreso than the name of the company, moreso than the location, moreso than the start/end dates. There's no point putting a lot of time (if any) listing mundane tasks which are expected of you.
Also note the redundancy of technologies listed in the per-job description, ie, there's overlap with the summary of technologies near the beginning of the resume.
The rewrite has had me spending something like 2 hours one evening, another 30-60 mins another time, and another 2.5 hours another evening. I'm still not done, but I'd say most of the hard work is done. As I continue further back in time with my job history, the details tend to be less relevant, and I'm able to pare the descriptions to the bone. My friend pointed out that anything which is more than 10-15 years old is no longer terribly relevant; at best it shows that you've done your time in the trenches, but any "success stories" from back then won't have the same impact as anything you did within the past year.
I haven't even gotten to the education section, but it's pretty brief already. Certifications and possibly relevant courses might be useful here. Again, how far in the past these courses were will come into play.
My friend pointed out that these days having a general purpose resume isn't as useful as it once was. As you point out, there's a lot of automation going on, so having keywords which match the position you're targeting isn't unethical at all, so long as you're not misrepresenting yourself. Just remember that your resume is about marketing and selling yourself, so trying to match the needs of your 'customer' to the values you offer that you can 'sell' to them comes into play here. My friend goes on to say that once you get your resume polished up to a certain level, you may want to simply rearrange the order of the verbiage of the last few positions you held and/or your professional summary, in order to target the things your potential employer is seeking.
My friend also told me something which I'd not heard of before. He learned that a lot of the job positions out there are frequently just bait headhunters use to help line their coffers with employable resources, and don't actually lead to any open positions. Meaning, they're planning ahead for future job opportunities, and want to be able to take immediate action, rather than advertise the position and wait for responses. This may not be relevant in your case, since you've indicated you've found a great opportunity.
If you're having trouble coming up with the sales/marketing type words to really add 'punch' to your resume, you might need to sit down with a friend who understands your skills and your job industry and see how to effectively add 'spin'. A thesaurus might come in handy here, so long as you don't overdo it.
Remember, your resume is your introduction to an employer. If they have a stack of resumes in front of them, you want to be able to grab their attention within the first 1/4 to 1/2 a page, seriously GRAB their attention.
As I said, I've not completed my rewrite yet. But I've already trimmed the fat (and therefore the number of pages) by a LOT.