Resume critique

phaneuf1

Hi, can you guys check my resume and tell me what you think?
Thanks

PS: My first language is french so please tell me if I made some mistakes.

2013 - Resume - Critique.pdf

redz

Hi Phaneuf,

Usually I don't bother helping people with resumes because there are so many resources online. However, with English being your second language, I figure this is a bit of a special case. That, and I'm exceedingly bored right now.

Initial reaction:
Qualifying and quantifying professional experience is extremely important, and I see very little of it - most of these read more like positional requirements than experiences.
Qualifying: How does each of these experiences listed contribute to the overall organizational success or the success of your customers? Be specific - what constitutes successful training of two employees?
Quantifying: What size user bases were you dealing with? How many clone images were deployed and in what time frame? You closed an average of 50 calls per day - is this above or below average for this position at this organization?

EDIT: You want to sell yourself. We are professionals in an in demand industry, but there are a lot of us. You have to be able to set yourself apart - show how you are better than other potential candidates before you even get the interview.

Content:
Professional Skills/College Skills: Are these needed? I'm asking honestly, I've never placed them on a resume. I see a lot of people who do - you may want a second opinion on those. When I receive a resume, I almost invariably skip these unless I am looking for something very, very specific and I happen to CTRL-F into that section.

Format: It's initially pleasing to look at, but I don't really feel you're using your paper real-estate efficiently. Everything is double-spaced, and I don't see a need to have to read "Work with home office users to resolve computer and network connectivity issues related to Citrix, VPN, and RSA Security Token" twice, and especially not a third time in the "Professional Skills" section. I don't know that you need two pages to convey five years of professional experience, but that is purely a matter of opinion on my part.

Grammatical items:
Any number under 39 should generally be written in words, not in the numerical representation. This appears multiple places.

"Responsible of technology", 2008-2009:
- I don't know French, but I assume the title is a direct translation because of the grammatical confusion. Based on your experience, I would change it to something akin to "Technology Custodian". It means the same thing.

"Desk side support specialist" 2009-2010, 2010-2010
- Again, don't know French. "Desktop Support Specialist" is probably a more accurate job title. I would also capitalize the first letter of each word of each title. I'm pretty sure they don't really constitute proper nouns, but English is a screwed up language. You'll just have to trust me on this one.

phaneuf1

Thank You for your help!

Better?
I removed an irrelevant job experience (less than 6 months and pretty similar to what I curretly do)
I removed the months
I removed the college skills
Quantified a little more my skills
Made it fit in 1 page
Corrected the English mistakes but likely made some others

What do you think now?

redz

At first glance it looks much better. I don't want this to fall off my radar, but I've been drinking quite a bit, so I also don't want to give a full review right now.

I'll do my best to get a good review written up with more specifics now that the basic stuff looks good. If I haven't responded by ~10PM GMT tomorrow, message me a reminder.

redz

Okay, I'll go a little more line-by-line with this one. These are just the phrasings I would change, for various reasons. Some to give them more bite, some for grammar. And this is personal opinion, others may disagree.

2011-present:
-Provided bilingual first level support to 40,000+ employees using HP Service Center and ServiceNow tracking systems
-Troubleshooting of over 40 incidents per day by phone in a fast paced, high security financial industry
-Maintained above average scores on both monthly call quality evaluations and feedback from end users
(Only if you were really above average, otherwise stick with "high")

2010:
-Provided hardware and software support to over 100 students and professors
-Integral to building and maintenance of an open source inventory system (OCS Inventory)
-Maintenance and troubleshooting Windows 2003 and Linux servers
(What flavor of Linux? Red Hat? Say "Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL))"

2009-2010:
-Remediation of server flaws in the production environment with daily deadlines
-Trained two employees to be able to perform the role of Desktop Support Specialists

2008-2009:
-Provided hardware, software, and firmware support to over 75 teachers and administrative staff of five schools
-Built computer images to be compatible with in-place network infrastructure, and upgraded three high schools with over 200 new computers, using Symantec Ghost to efficiently deploy images over the network
-Helped to migrate four local domain and data servers to the new centralized servers
-Maintained Nortel switches and ensured connectivity between computers and different VLANs.

phaneuf1

Thank You Very Much for your advice redz! It means a lot to me!
Today I posted my Resume on a few job board websites and got 5 calls. Thanks to you I have a Great Resume now!

redz

Toronto must be awesome for jobs. Wow.