How to Make Resume in Word

Today, we’re going to look at how to make a resume in Microsoft Word that showcases your qualifications and impresses potential employers. Word makes it easy to create a professional and eye-catching resume. We’ll also look at how you can leverage the power of AI to make your resume stand out to hiring managers.

I recommend starting with a free resume template at https://create.microsoft.com. This is where you’ll find all the different Microsoft 365 templates for Word and other apps like PowerPoint and Excel. Simply search for resumes or click on the trending searches for resumes.

Here you’ll find hundreds of different resume templates. Some of them have photos, others don’t. In the top-right, you can even filter by color.

Once you click on a template, you have the option to Customize in Word, which uses Word on the web. This is entirely free to use even if you don’t subscribe to Microsoft 365. Alternatively, you can also download and edit the resume in the Word desktop app.

Once you choose a template, you can customize the text and layout, add your personal information, skills, education, and work experience, and save your resume as a PDF file.

To help you with writing your resume, you can use AI. I recommend using Bing Chat AI. It gives you access to GPT 4 and it’s free to access. You can ask questions like “Can you help me write a summary for my resume”. Then, simply include some of your responsibilities and accomplishments and you’ll get a beautifully written summary. You can even have it review your text on your resume, like your work experience bullet points.

One word of caution with AI. Sometimes AI hallucinates or basically makes up information. Whenever you use any type of content from AI, go back and verify to make sure that everything is accurate. With your resume, you want to put your best foot forward. So totally fine to use AI, but you also don’t want to invent things. Unless of course you’re an inventor, in which case talk about all the different things that you’ve invented.

The work experience section is by far one of the most important sections of your resume. This is where you talk about what type of roles you’ve had and what you accomplished in those roles. I recommend:

• 3 – 5 bullet points per role (think of this as a movie trailer, not the movie itself)
• Put the most important ones first and the less important ones later. Why is that? Well, hiring managers start from top to bottom and they may not make it to the bottom.
• Avoid personal pronouns like I when starting a bullet point. The resume is all about you. It’s implied that you took the action.
• Start each bullet with a very strong action verb. Think of verbs like built, designed, led, drove. Avoid weaker verbs like participated, helped, assisted. On your resume, you want to show what you did or what you accomplished, and those strong action verbs help.
• Structure your bullet points using the Action, Context, and Impact format. For example, “Built the Kevin Cookie Company (ACTION), from scratch into a global leader in the baked goods industry (CONTEXT), generating over $5 billion per year from 1,000 retail locations (IMPACT).”

Once you finish your resume, you’ll want to save it as a PDF. Go up to File and then Export. You can then create a PDF file to send to the hiring manager.

Best of luck landing your dream job!