Your resume may need revision to ensure you’re positioning yourself to make it through the initial steps of the government hiring process.
There is no such thing as too much information when preparing your resume, which may be several pages long and should include detailed information about the jobs you’ve held, your responsibilities, and what you accomplished.
This is an example of what your resume might look like for a position with TTS.
General recommendations
- When you’re preparing your application, be sure to reference the Qualifications & Evaluation sections of the job post to help you best frame your experience.
- Don’t get hung up on trying to match specific formatting; do make sure you’ve included the information relevant to each section.
- Be as detailed as possible. Length is not an issue as long as the information you’re including is relevant.
- For your most relevant, recent, or longest held position, list eight-10 bullet points about your responsibilities and accomplishments. For each prior position, you can list fewer points focusing on the information that is most relevant to the job for which you are applying.
- Don’t be afraid to use technical terminology if it’s relevant to your current or past roles or to the role for which you are applying. Do avoid acronyms and abbreviations.
- We don’t use automated screening tools, so your application will be evaluated by people who have varying levels of familiarity with your professional experience. It’s better to be explicit and not assume the reader has expert domain knowledge or context.
- Quantify as applicable.
Key information for each position
This is the information that you should include for each position on your resume.
- Company/organization name
- Size of organization (number of employees)
- Location (City, State)
- Dates of employment (MM/YYYY)
- Hours per week (e.g. 15, 20, 40. If “full time” list 40 hours)
- Job/position title
- GS Level (Only relevant to current or past federal employees)
- Brief description of the organization (one-two sentences)
- Brief description of the product/project/team you worked on or supported (one-two sentences, if applicable)
- List of relevant skills, tools, technologies used
- Specific duties, responsibilities, accomplishments of the position
Detailed description of sections
Brief description of the organization and brief description of the product/project/team you worked on or supported (if applicable)
This should provide a context for your work and accomplishments which helps us understand how they’re applicable to our work and the role for which you’re applying. Include the following information:
- Clients/customers type: public facing, end-users, internal, B2B, civic tech, etc.
- Impact/performance metrics and scope: users, clients, datasets, uptime, cycle time, etc.
- Team size/composition
Relevant skills, tools, technologies used
Describing the skills, methodologies, techniques, and tools you used in a position is important, but they can't simply be a list. If the skills, tools and technologies is just a list, it will not be able to be used to help you meet the minimum qualifications required for the role. You need to provide the context of how and why those skills were used in that position.
Example resume excerpt
This is an example of what you resume might look like for a position with TTS:
Other sections to include, as applicable
- Volunteer work (include the organization’s name, years of participation, and a one-line description of your role)
- Relevant awards (include awarding organization, title of award, year received, and any relevant details, such as chosen as award winner out of 300 contenders)
- Relevant public speaking engagements and presentations (include title of presentation, name of conference/event, month and year of presentation, along with any other relevant details)
- Certifications held (name of certificate, institution issuing the certificate, year issued)
- Relevant professional affiliations (organization name, years of participation)
- Published work, including personal blog posts (title of published work, publication, month and year of publication)
- Training (name of training or course, organization providing the training, MM/YYYY completed)
