Writing up my first resume. Impressive! Actually, it's not so impressive. Advice?

Please use spellcheck on your resume. If you misspell a word, it makes you look like an idiot. My reaction to a misspelled word is that the person is not thorough.

I think the most important thing you can do when looking for your first job is to keep your resume short and to the point. No one wants to spend a day reading yours. My first job out of college was at a radio station in San Francisco. My resume was probably just one in hundreds of resumes and they liked mine best because it said a lot in a short amount of time.

Action words are good; writing big words for the sake of sounding important is bad. If you find yourself writing “amalgamate,” you’re way off track. Try “merge.”

Make sure to have a nice format-you want it to be pleasing to the eye before anything else. Also describe what you did in your jobs by being precise and using words such as implemented, instructed, managed, and so on. Make each job sound as if you did something important.

One of the hardest things to do on a resume is get all the little details correct and uniform.

Yet it's that uniformity (or, more precisely, the lack thereof) that's the easiest to spot. People are only going to glance at your resume for a second or two--make sure you have all of your bullet points (or whatever) in a row, and the tenses for your action verbs agree with one another.