Your resume is your personal marketing tool. It is an advertisement of your skills and experiences, and wins you the opportunity to interview with a prospective employer. Without an effective resume, you often will not get the opportunity to interview. The right resume will get your foot in the door.

Resume writing is one of the most important facets of your job search. Fortunately, technology resumes have a very simple format. The key to writing an effective resume is to put yourself into the head of the prospective hiring manager or human resources recruiter.

Survey results show that the average time spent reading an individual resume is 10 to 30 seconds. Understand that this task either falls on a professional recruiter who scans hundreds of resumes in a week, or on an already overworked hiring manager who is covering for a staff shortage and trying to interview for qualified candidates at the same time.

Keeping this information in mind, try to:

Stress positives: Leave out negatives where you can.

Be concise: Balance between detail and succinct presentation.

Avoid abbreviations: Spell everything out completely.

Keep a consistent and professional format: Pick a spacing and format style and stick with it. Err on the conservative side.

Edit carefully: Screen for grammatical errors, poor punctuation and other avoidable mistakes.

Brevity: Try and keep the resume under two pages long.

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