Applying is a chance to communicate your skills, experience, education, and personality to a potential employer to see if there’s a good fit for a specific job.
Resumes
A listing of your Personal Information (Name, Location, Phone Number, Email Address), and a brief description of your Skills, Experience, and Education.
Keep bullet points action-oriented, start them with a verb, and try to explain your impact quantitatively – evidence speaks louder than assertions.
Skills - what can you do?
- The meat and potatoes, can you do the tasks required of the job?
- Can only be learned by doing, demonstrated in the Experience section
Experience - where did you do it before?
- Evidence that you have used the skills you claim to have in a professional setting with other people
- Great skills are useless without great experience, and great experience can make up for lack of skills.
- Sometimes who you know is more important than what you know.
Education - random piece of paper
- Evidence that you have verifiably studied the knowledge you claim to have
- The most bullshit, unimportant part of any resume, for the most part this becomes little more than a checkbox for an employer.
Cover Letters
A chance to explain the story of you, why you want to work at this company, your career trajectory, and how this job fits into your plan.
General business communication rules apply here: be positive, don’t talk shit about anything or anyone, emphasize why you and the company are a great fit. Don’t ramble about irrelevant stuff, but the more personality you can add using your own writing style, humor, and relevant anecdotes, the better this letter will be.