Resume Rubric

Headings and requirements

Full marks: all required sections present, named plainly, in a sensible order. Weak: creative section titles, or a required section missing.

Contact details

Full marks: one line in the body of the document: phone, professional email, profile link. Weak: a personal email address, or details stranded in the page header.

Relevant education

Full marks: degree, year, and the classes, awards, projects or skills that serve this role. Weak: every module listed, or high school still on the page.

Relevant experience

Full marks: full and part time work, volunteering, military, licences, with complete months. Weak: a title and a year, with no outcome attached.

Details and skills

Full marks: every bullet lands a number: how many, how much, how often, how fast. Weak: duties described with no scale, and skills nobody could verify.

Appropriate length

Full marks: one page, or two only where real history fills them. Weak: padded to fill space, or three pages for a graduate.

Consistent layout

Full marks: spacing, alignment and indents behave the same way down the whole page. Weak: margins and gaps that shift between sections.

Reverse chronological

Full marks: most recent first in every section, so the reader never reorders it themselves. Weak: mixed order, or the strongest entry buried at the bottom.

Easy to read

Full marks: a six second scan finds the name, the target and the strongest evidence. Weak: dense blocks, or a layout that hides the top third.

Overall attractiveness

Full marks: neat, deliberate, and it stands out without decoration. Weak: a template still showing, or design that fights the reading.

Bold, italic, underline

Full marks: used sparingly and consistently to mark titles and employers. Weak: emphasis everywhere, which is the same as nowhere.

Follows the guidelines

Full marks: dates, positions and places formatted the same way throughout. Weak: mixed date formats, or a place written three ways.

Fonts consistent

Full marks: one family, readable at print size, nothing below 10pt. Weak: two or three fonts, or type shrunk to force a fit.

Accurate grammar

Full marks: clean throughout, and it reads as though somebody proofed it. Weak: errors a single read would have caught.

Past tense action verbs

Full marks: every bullet opens with a verb that names what you did. Weak: was responsible for, helped with, worked on.

Professional vocabulary

Full marks: precise, industry appropriate, and free of filler adjectives. Weak: hardworking, passionate, detail oriented, team player.

Spelling and punctuation

Full marks: no errors, including in the company name and the job title. Weak: the employer’s own name misspelled.

Final comments

Originality

Minus 15 points for content that was never asked for and does not belong on a resume. Read your own page before you send it.