When I talk about resumes and cover letters, I’m opinionated and direct, and I’ll always tell you exactly what I think. That’s my own characterization of myself, anyway. Others have called me rude, insensitive, arrogant, and other, more R-rated terms. But usually the people who knock me are students who have never had a full-time job, or teachers who have never been given the authority to hire anyone for a full-time job. Rest assured that I respect everyone’s right to their opinion – I just think my opinion is usually right. Hey, that’s what makes it my opinion, right?

Here’s the deal about why I wrote this book. I’ll make it brief:

I’m 30 — older than you, but not a dinosaur. I still clearly remember applying for scholarships, internships and jobs. If you’re lucky, your high school or college may have devoted a whopping one or two class periods to showing you how to do a resume. Or maybe you didn’t even get that: perhaps you’ve got one of those “career counseling” offices at your school, with services that are available to everyone – and used by no one.

I’d rather help you get a job than stroke your ego. There are already way too many people in the world who would rather kiss your ass and send you on your way instead of taking a little extra time to help you identify and fix your flaws. You know many of these people already – they’re your teachers, friends and parents.

I would rather tell you the truth about the weaknesses in your resume, have you go fix them, and then get a job — than tell you how nice, perfect and wonderful your resume is, and then watch you send it out and get no callbacks. Remember, the time to correct your resumes is NOW, rather than after you send them out. I wrote this book to stop you from making mistakes that could cost you interviews, so if I’m looking at your resume and find a lot of suggested changes, then that’s good. No changes, that’s good, too. Only good outcomes. Also remember that opinions differ on a lot of these things — I’m just going to give you mine.

What’s the point of a resume, anyway? I mean, if you want the job, why don’t you just send a letter and ask nicely if you can have it, pretty please with sugar on top?

That’d be nice – sure would eliminate a lot of time spent polishing (and padding) a resume. But of course, employers would like to hire someone who can actually do the job, so they ask for a resume. Now, this doesn’t always equal hiring success; even with resumes to guide them, most employers routinely screw up and hire the wrong person now and then – someone who not only isn’t ideal for the job, but someone who absolutely cannot perform the job duties whatsoever. If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. This happens, and it happens often. Here’s an example of it happening to me. Funny story – funny now, anyway.

I mentioned earlier how, during my time at Cox Interactive, I got an early promotion that led to the exodus of several of my colleagues. I wasn’t given the budget to replace them all, but I did get to replace my calendar editor. This is the person who ensures that all of the sports, music, and other entertainment events going on around town were dutifully entered into our website’s calendar so that our audience would find something fun to do if they came looking. And every time they found something fun to do, they’d remember they found it at our site, and – we hoped – become loyal, repeat visitors to our site. Those are important in the website-building world.

A calendar editor doesn’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar; in fact, it’s better if she’s not. A Rhodes Scholar would get really bored really fast with the tedium that is calendar maintenance. In fact, because it’s just repetitive maintenance, perhaps the job should’ve been called “calendar janitor”; using the word “editor” conjured up visions of midnight dealines, last-minute rewrites and gleefully cranking out the scoop of the day, none of which would ever, ever happen to the calendar editor. The job basically consists of entering hundreds of lines into a form, day after day after day. Lather, rinse, repeat. If ever there were a cog in the machinery of Internet media, it is the calendar editor.

And not only did the job require no special knowledge, it also happened to pay extremely well — $35,000. That’s not CEO money, but for data entry in a cushy office where you can bring your headphones and drink free Starbucks all day, it’s an incredible gig. Knowing that, it should be very easy to find a good calendar editor, right? Right.

Except when it’s not.

I had several applicants, all of whom seemed to have a strong pulse and at least 8 working fingers, which is just about all you need in the way of physical prowess to be a calendar editors. But one applicant stood out. Not only could she breathe and chew gum and the same time, but she was actually a former calendar editor for our chief rival website! And at that time, the rival was eating our lunch, so getting their old calendar editor was a giant coup. Not only could she do the job in her sleep, but she’d bring us tips and tricks from the competition that we’d never seen before! We’d have a pipeline to every event in every corner of the Phoenix metro area, from the U2 concerts in the arenas to the back-alley cockfights on the south side. Life was good. Problem solved.

To this day, I don’t know what the hell happened with that lady. All I do know is that she showed up….

This is the single most important concept of this book, and I repeat it several hundred times (seems like, anyway) throughout the book. This seems obvious, but honestly, most people don’t really understand this until it’s pointed out to them. Ask someone what their resume is, and the answer goes something like, “it’s the thing you send out to get a job.” Well yes, but no, not really. It’s much more than that, and you can’t approach it quite that haphazardly. Here’s why:

You, like everyone else in the world, are a complex person with many skills, faults, likes, dislikes, aptitudes, challenges, etc. You could fill a book writing about your personality alone. But you don’t have time to write it, and even if you did, I, your prospective employer wouldn’t read it. I’m busy. Really busy. I have an entire, 50-hour-a-week job to do, and that doesn’t count this whole process of sifting through resumes and doing job interviews. Plus, I prefer crime novels anyway.

So we’ve established that I don’t want to read your life story – at least, not now. But you still want the job, so you have to tell me something about yourself, and it does need to be substantive. Needs to be long on substance and short on B.S. that I’d rather not waste my time reading. And this, my friends, is why God created resumes.

Resumes exist for you, the applicant, to succinctly tell me, the employer, everything I need to know about exactly why I should hire you — and not a bit more (did I mention you’ll hear that a lot before you get to the end of this book?). Later on in this book, I’ll examine in some pretty fine detail what you should and shouldn’t include in your resume. But first, before you even start your resume (or start to make changes to it, which you’ll almost certainly do after you’ve read this book from beginning to end), here are a couple of things you need to know first.

Many people, especially those applying for their first real job, have a very “wishful-thinking” scenario in their heads about what happens when they send their resumes off to a prospective employer. In this scenario, the boss usually sits at a huge desk in a pristine office with a lovely view. His eyeglasses (or her eyeglasses – you choose, it’s your fantasy) are dropped slightly down on his nose, and with every line he reads, he nods ever more approvingly, more assured than ever that you’re the best person for the job. He picks up his phone and calls Smith in the corner office. “Smith, have you seen the resume for this Jane Doe? Wow! Now that’s who we need!” He hangs up. He hits the speakerphone call button again. His assistant answers. “Justin, we need to get this Jane Doe in for an interview right away. Please call her and set something up this week, today if possible.” Justin the Assistant calls you and tells you that Mr. Boss likes your resume and would like you to come in. You do. After 10 minutes of getting to know each other, your suitability for the throne is confirmed, and the job is yours.

Now, here’s what really happens. Your resume arrives in the HR department, where it’s opened and placed in a stack with hundreds of others. The stack continues to grow until the HR department determines it’s gotten big enough. Then that stack is delivered not to the boss, but the unlucky slug that gets the job of sorting through them all. This unlucky slug probably isn’t excited about the prospect of sifting through 800 resumes, since his other job responsibilities haven’t decreased any, and this will only pack his schedule more tightly than it’s already packed.

But he doesn’t want to be responsible for hiring a dud, so he takes the task seriously. Over a period of days, he sifts through the resumes, hoping to weed out the 90 percent of resumes that all sound the same and discover the exceptional ones………..

but more than likely, it’s in the middle. <emphasize the “I won’t get that far” angle. Remember that I as the employer will never get my first impression from you, yourself. I’ll get it from your resume. You may be the most charismatic and knowledgeable person alive. You may have the straightest teeth around, spring-fresh deodorant and a fantastic interview outfit that makes you look so fantastic that no one could see you in it without offering you a job. But it doesn’t matter. If your resume sucks, you’ll never get the chance to show me any of it, because I won’t want to interview you.

Ever thought of it that way? Makes sense, doesn’t it?

My agency once managed a very large online events calendar for a major news website in Phoenix, where I live. It was a very important job, but it didn’t require a great deal of experience, so we placed an ad at Arizona State University, looking for an intern to handle the job of editing the calendar. We got dozens of responses, but my favorite one went something like this:

Dear Mr. Barsch:

I read with great interest about the job of calender editor with your company. I think I would be an excellent candidate for this job, because I currently work on the events calender for my church, and am very aware of community events and also good with computers. I am excited about the opportunity to become your calender editor and look forward to talking more with you about this opportunity.

Sincerely,
Jane Doe

Maybe I’m biased because I’ve been a fairly decent speller since I was young, but come on – are you kidding me? The average fifth grader can spell the word “calendar,” I guarantee you. And if you can’t – hey, get up and walk to one of the walls in your dorm room or apartment. See that big thing with all the squares and numbers on it? Check the cover, and I guarantee you’ll see the word “CALENDAR” written somewhere on it. Copy that spelling. That’s all you have to do to get it right.

Against my better judgment, I couldn’t resist writing this girl back. I don’t consider myself to be a crusader for correct spelling, because that’s a losing battle if ever there was one. Usually these things just get deleted, but some people are begging for a little correction. And I told myself to feel good about it, because my “tough love” might actually help this girl someday. So I wrote her back, and my response went something like this:

Dear Jane,

Thanks for your inquiry about the calendar job. I wanted to be frank with you and tell you that you were eliminated from consideration for the job due to the fact that you misspelled “calender” three times in your email. To be honest, I couldn’t trust you to do error-free work as a calendar editor when you’re unable to spell the word “calendar.” I wish you the best of luck in the future.

Best regards,

Josh Barsch

I didn’t expect her to feel good when she received it, but sometimes you need to hear the unpleasant truth in order to improve, right? Well, not according to Jane. She actually wrote back.

Dear Mr. Barsch,

I don’t know why you had to write me back just to tell me about my spelling. I would have liked it better if you had not written me back at all. I am not a perfect speller, but I still think I could have done a very good job.

Jane Doe

So much for trying to be helpful.

Many people today tend to say that spelling on your resume matters less depending on the nature of the job you’re applying for. They say things like, “What do you expect? I’m in marketing!” or “I spray for termites. Don’t expect me to win the spelling bee.” But that’s not the point. No one expects you to be a perfect speller or grammarian in your day-to-day life; however, your resume is supposed to be your one-time, absolute best possible effort. It’s not just you — it’s you and the dictionary and whoever you can find to proofread it, taking as much time as you need to make this ONE document perfect. Yes, perfect – no errors whatsoever.

Whether you like it or not, if you misspell words on a resume, you are telling your employer that you’re lazy, and that’s the worst possible thing to tell a potential employer. We think, “Wow, if this person is putting his/her best foot forward on a resume and it still looks half-assed, then can you imagine how half-assed his/her work is going to be?”

So how do you get your resume into tip-top, error-free shape, even if you can’t spell worth a damn? For starters, of course, use the spell-check function on your computer program. That will catch most of the obvious errors. But once the document is spell-checked, give a copy of it to friends, teachers, spouse, children or whoever else you know that’s a better speller than you are. Ask them straight out, “Would you mind taking two minutes to check my resume for mistakes? I’m not a great speller.”

Don’t be embarrassed to say you’re not a good speller – trust me, you’re in good company. Once you’ve had a few people glance over it for errors, you should have an error-free document. It doesn’t take long, and it can make the difference between getting the job and getting your resume tossed in the garbage.

Most of what I just said about spelling applies to grammar as well, although there is one slight difference: most people, including your potential employers, are not masters of grammar. You can screw up a little here and there, and it’ll go unnoticed. For instance, should you say “if I were a rich man” or “if I was a rich man”? Unless you’re applying for a copy editor job at a newspaper, it’s not a big deal, because copy editors are just about the only people in the world who know every grammatical nuance of the English language (by the way, the answer is “were” – I used to be a copy editor). On the other hand, if you misspell “calendar,” that’ll jump out at everyone who sees your resume.

If you don’t know the difference between “their” and “there,” “its” and “it’s” and “your” and “you’re,” then don’t leave college yet.

As a humor columnist for my college newspaper, The Capaha Arrow at Southeast Missouri State University, I was long-winded and often wrote longer columns than space would allow my editors to print. Seems I loved the sound of my own voice (and if you’ve gotten this far into this e-book, I doubt you’re surprised). So my adviser gave me an excellent, if politically incorrect, piece of advice: “The ideal length of an article is the ideal length of a woman’s skirt,” he said. “Long enough to cover everything, but short enough to make it interesting.” And the same holds true for resumes.

If there’s one rule that just about everyone has heard about resume writing, it’s that you should keep your resume to one page. But is it true? As usual, the answer is, “it depends.” If you’re a college student – especially an undergraduate student – then 99 percent of the time, the answer is yes, you should keep it to one page. If you’re some kind of wunderkind who was speaking five languages and taking community college classes while your peers were double-dutching and making Pinewood Derby cars, then you may have an argument for a second page. If not, then stick to one page. And I really do mean 99 percent of the time, so this probably means you.

Yes, but: Inevitably, when I talk about the one-page rule, I get at least one or two students who raise their hands and say, “But I’ve accomplished SO much and I’m in SO many activities and have SO many accomplishments, that I just can’t fit all my important information on one page.” My answer? Unlikely. Certainly, some students are so busy achieving that, when it comes time to get it all down on paper, it just won’t fit. But all that tells you is:

a) You need to be more choosy about what you include in your resume. Your future employer can live without knowing some of this stuff.

b) The things you do include, you need to write about more concisely.

c) You need to use the formatting tools in your word-processing software to your advantage.

Again, I don’t say this to discourage you high-achievers out there, or to suggest that you shouldn’t be proud of all your accomplishments. You should. And I know how you feel. I graduated summa cum laude, got a string of writing awards, was in a half-dozen honor societies, etc., so I know what it’s like to feel like a hotshot coming out of school. However, you have to realize that none of the slave-to-the-grind, real-world employers out there – people who don’t know you from Adam – has the time to recognize each accomplishment and be as proud of you as you, your family and friends are. That’s just not on their agenda, and it’s never going to be. What IS on their agenda is to find someone to fill the position in front of them. And you can save them time by fitting all of your relevant information onto one beautiful, concise page. Trust me, it can be done.

Keeping your resume to one page will seem difficult at first, but it’s not that bad once you learn a few tips and tricks. The tips have to do with the content you do and don’t include, and the tricks are in the formatting.

• There, I said it. Whew. I feel better now. There are some things that happen every day in this world that make absolutely no sense, but they keep happening anyway, just because that’s the way it’s always been. This phenomenon explains, among other things, why every Yanni CD goes platinum, why Pizza Hut keeps stuffing different crap inside their pizza crust, why all 26 Wayans brothers continue to get movie roles, and so on.Go ahead and add the resume objective to this list, because if you’ve never realized how utterly stupid a concept this is, then I’m about to tell you. I am a psychic. Did you know that? I’ll bet you didn’t. But I’ll prove it, because even though I’ve never met you or talked to you, I can predict with absolute certainty what your objective is in sending your resume. I promise, I can do it. You ready? Here it comes…TO GET THE JOB.Right? That’s why you’re sending the resume wherever you’re sending it – because you want the job – a job, the job, some job, any job. Now, I have a confession to make: I’m not a psychic, just a smartass. The point here is: the objective is always the same, and everyone knows it: You want the job. And that’s good, because I, the employer, am the one who posted the job. I did that because I wanted to get resumes from people like you who want the job that I posted. That whole process pretty well goes without saying, right?Then WHY do people waste 20 percent of the space on their one sacred resume page explaining, basically, why they’re sending me this resume? I know, I know: the answer is, because somebody, somewhere along the line told you that’s what you’re supposed to do. Well, I’m telling you it’s not. Go directly to your resume right now, highlight the objective, and cut it out. Now. Seriously, right now, go do it.

  You may be afraid to do this. You may think, “but EVERY sample resume I see has an objective, and EVERY book includes an objective section!” Be that as it may, please, don’t be afraid. No employer in the history of mankind has ever picked up a resume and said, “Wow, this is a fine resume, except…there’s no objective! Maybe they don’t really want the job and just sent me the resume to confuse me. Someone’s playing a trick on me, because without an objective, I just can’t be certain of why this resume ever landed on my desk!” It does seem ridiculous when you think of it like that, doesn’t it?

  If you can’t bring yourself to remove the objective from you resume – well, I tried. But if you’re going to include it anyway, let me give you a piece of advice (sigh, not that you’ll probably listen, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt). Be honest. Say you want the Widget-Maker job that you saw in the paper. Don’t attempt one of those fantastically awful snowjobs that go something like this:

  ”I am seeking a challenging, growth-oriented position where I can develop my communication and organizational abilities and utilize my…”

  Ugh. I’ve read passages in O.J. Simpson’s book that are more honest than resume objective statements like these. Stop already! That’s not what you’re “seeking” – you’re seeking the job I have. Since you sent me your resume, I can only assume you want it, regardless of whether it’s challenging or stimulating or gives you the goosebumps. And don’t forget, this can backfire on you, too. Maybe I’m ready to offer you a $50,000 job that doesn’t have much growth potential. Does that mean I shouldn’t call you and give you the job? (Professional Hint: No! Take the job, take the money, learn as much as you can, then jump ship to a better company later.)

• • Acing midterms and finals is still the number one way to leave college with an excellent GPA. Exams are supposed to cover the most important concepts and skills that a class has to offer and reveal to what degree you’ve mastered all these concepts and skills. So why is it that test scores don’t necessarily give an accurate forecast of how good you’ll be on the job?There are several reasons, actually. There’s an incredible difference in the way “tests” are perceived in college, and in the world outside college. First, let’s get clear on what tests are supposed be: a yardstick to measure how much knowledge you have about some given subject at some given point in time. That’s pretty much it. Note that I didn’t say it was the final day of reckoning at the Crossroads, the day you must match wits with Satan himself about organic chemistry or Constitutional Law for the right to live the rest of your days above ground. It’s just a TEST to see where you are right now. And in the grand scheme of your life and career, “where you are right now” is very near the beginning.But the college system doesn’t treat you that way. It treats you – in every class, at the end of every semester – like you’re at the end of the line. Know everything by now, or else. Or else you’ll get a bad grade. And because of that, students go about their learning process differently. Instead of learning as many concepts and skills as they can for the long-term, they do something different: they start preparing for tests.

    If you’re a college student now or have been a student any time in the last 10 years, you know what I’m talking about. Rarely does a student (and I’m speaking for myself here, too) attempt to read, learn, synthesize and retain all of the material in every course’s syllabus. Believe it or not, that’s what most of our past generations of college students were expected to do – learn everything the teacher covered in a semester, because you never knew what was going to be on the midterms and finals when they rolled around.

    That almost never happens now. Most professors tell you what’s going to be covered on the big tests. Many will even review some questions from the actual test with you. Many will hold big review sessions during regular class hours – the class hours you’re paying them to teach you new stuff, not old stuff. Some will even GIVE YOU THE DAMNED TEST so you can go home and study it. That’s right – they give you a piece of paper with some questions, you go home and find the answers to those questions, you come back the next period and transfer those answers onto the same piece of paper, and voila – you get an “A” on the test.

    Now, many of you are undoubtedly saying, “Yeah….so?” And I probably would’ve said the same thing when I was in college – whatever freed up my time to drink more beer and meet different girls was fine with me. But my point here is different: it’s not to stop partying and start studying all the time – far from it. The point is, if you’re going , you might as well be studying something useful that you’ll remember, rather than 40 questions on a test that you’ll forcefully shove out of your mind once you’ve dropped the answer sheet on your professor’s desk.

    There isn’t too much professors can do about this – it’s simply the way the educational system is set up. The one remedy that’s sometimes available is the ability to take a class on the pass-fail system, rather than for a specific letter grade. I have long been a big proponent of pass-fail classes, and still recommend to any student to take a class pass-fail any time you can. But I’ll talk more about that later.

  • What are the possibilities? You have a low GPA — definitely leave it off. You have an average GPA — why include it? What does it add to your application? It’s strong — ok, but it’s still just GPA, and employers know that the stuff you did to get that GPA are very different from what you’ll do at a job. You don’t go to work from 9-10 and 2-4 on MWF and 12-3 on T and TH. Work is different.Exception — if you have a really, really high GPA, like summa cum laude high or a 4.0, maybe you should include it. There’s still a “wow” factor there, because the likelihood is your boss didn’t graduate with that high of a GPA, and it still impresses some people. That said, remember that most bosses know that your GPA doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a good employee, worker, whatever. Worst, least knowledgeable person I ever had to work with was a 4.0 student, undergrad and grad school.

    Yes, but: Some students and parents (especially parents) think I hold GPA in low regard because I never had a very good one myself, and that I’m simply giving you the “I never had a good GPA, and look at me now!” line. Sorry, wrong answer. I was the salutatorian of my high school class with a 3.96 (we didn’t have those highfalutin’, five-point AP classes in Box Elder, South Dakota, thank you very much), and I got my B.A. in English with a 3.9. Am I bragging? Not at all – just telling you from personal experience that a high GPA means very, very little to anyone outside of your dinner table. In fact, let me punctuate this point with a final anecdote:

    One of the biggest regrets I have about my college education is dropping my French minor. I loved studying foreign languages, and to this day, I still do. But in the middle of my French III semester, I abruptly dropped the class. Why? Because I thought I was going to get a “B” and that would hurt my GPA. Let me be clear here: That decision was asinine beyond words. I cannot describe how stupid it was for me to do that. Never once, in the history of my life, has anyone asked me what grade I received in French III. Ever. But because of that choice, there ended my formal French study. There ended my quest to master that beautiful, romantic tongue – to saunter off to Europe and meander through France, Switzerland, Belgium, wooing lovely francophone girls into jelly with my rugged American exterior yet oh-so-cultured mastery of le francais.

    But thanks to my absolutely silly pursuit of few extra hundredths of a point on my undergraduate GPA, my French stinks. I’ve been to Montreal and Paris and stammered like a fool each time, relying only upon the locals’ goodwill toward English-speakers to get by (lots more of that in Montreal than Paris, by the way). Oh, well. I was in Paris on my honeymoon anyway, so I guess my wife would’ve put a stop to any lovely-French-girl wooing even if I could’ve managed some.

    Don’t be like me. Learn what you want to learn and forget about the GPA. You will never, ever regret it.

• Everything I said about personal interests also goes for social Greek organizations, and also most service fraternities. SomeYes, but: Aren’t fraternities and sororities great for networking after college is over – including job-market networking? Yes, they’re definitely great for networking. And I must confess that I never joined a fraternity, so I don’t have personal knowledge of exactly how far a frat-brother connection will go in the way of landing you a job. My conversations with Greek friends and acquaintances, however, indicate that such a connection is sometimes enough to get your foot in the proverbial door. In light of that, I might make one exception to the above rule: If you’re applying for a job where you know that one of your fraternity/sorority members works and has hiring discretion, then you may want to sneak your affiliation onto your resume. Again, I emphasize this approach only for jobs where one of your Greek brethren has some pull. Otherwise, in a normal job-opening situation where you’re going in cold, fraternity and sorority membership won’t impress the person reading your resume.Yes, but (Part II): “Greeks do lots of charity work, so my association with a fraternity or sorority is relevant for that reason.” It’s true that Greeks do a lot of charity work, but charity work is not the reason for their existence. So you can’t claim a “halo entry” for a fraternity the way you could for, say, working at Habitat for Humanity. Most of your employers have been to college, and whether we were Greek or not, we know that the primary reason a person joins a fraternity or sorority isn’t to do charity work. There’s plenty of charity work out there that doesn’t require pledging, hazing, and dues. And that’s not a knock on Greek life at all – to each his own – but let’s call a spade a spade.

• Almost without exception, you should not put high school achievements on your resume. Unless you cured a disease or saved the world from certain destruction and have the newspaper articles to prove it, leave this stuff out. Why? Because things were different in high school. You were competing against a hodgepodge of 16- and 17-year-olds thrown together by the caprices of geography. Many of those teenagers had no interest whatsoever in competing with you for grades, awards, honors, etc. Some others dropped out altogether to (pick one) join a gang, deliver pizza full time, follow Phish around the country, or smoke cigarettes at the mall.The fact that your accomplishments bested those of your above-mentioned peers five years ago is not impressive to a present-day employer. It’s not that you can’t still feel good about it. Hey, I still treasure my high-school discus medals and that time I took third out of 150 competitors in an English Literature competition. But I don’t put it on my resume, because no one who sees my resume would care.The reason you don’t include that stuff is that you’re into a much higher level of competition now. Everyone you’re competing with wants exactly the same thing you want: the open job. And there aren’t any slouches competing with you anymore – those guys smoking cigarettes at the mall (yes, they’re still there, five years later) are not the ones competing with you now. Everyone you’re up against has a similar background, education and skill set. Because of that, it’s important that you emphasize your recent accomplishments – ones that you’ve carved out for yourself against your current crop of competitors, rather than people from the past who weren’t really breaking their necks to compete with you in the first place.

  Yes, but: “What about major accomplishments, like becoming an Eagle Scout?” There are indeed some accomplishments that mark a person for life, and garner praise for many years – even decades – after they’re earned, even if they’re earned during a person’s high school years. In this case, I’d make an exception to the above rules and include the accomplishment on your resume. For example, there’s no way I’d leave “Eagle Scout” off my resume (especially since I dropped out of Cub Scouts the first time they asked me to tie a knot).

  There may be other awards that carry similar weight, but I’m not aware of them, so your decision whether to include such an award in your resume will be up to you. But before you take the natural step of assuming your award or accomplishment is prestigious enough to include, ask yourself one question: When you tell people who don’t know you about your award, do they have to ask you to explain what that is? Or is it an accomplishment, like Eagle Scout, that everyone instantly recognizes? If it’s the former, then it probably doesn’t belong on your real-world, job-market resume.