Stupid Resume Mistakes

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

These are the basic dumb things people do the prove so costly.

Another Stupid Resume Mistake

I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. I’m the head coach for JobSearch.Community and welcome to “Stupid Resume Mistakes.” God, I’m sorry we have to do this, but people still forward resumes to me—even though I do almost exclusively coaching—and I’m stunned at how bad they are. So, let me start off by talking about a few of the basic mistakes that so many job hunters make that are so painful to read.

First of all, your resume makes no case for your candidacy. There was nothing in the resume that demonstrates that you fit the requirements of the job. Why do you think you’d get an interview unless you’ve made that case? Number two is you actually applied for a job instead of trying to network your way into an organization. There are lots of tools out there that will help you identify hiring managers so you don’t have to go through the Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Number three: when your resume is submitted, you haven’t tailored it. So, if you do have the skills, you haven’t really done a good enough job to highlight how your background matches up with the employer. Next, people still submit cover letters. Now, if you really want to be clever, what you do is make your cover letter page one of your resume and you use a format that’s nicknamed the “T-Square.” I developed it years ago, and other people picked up on it. It’s the notion that in one column (the left column) you put the requirement of the position, and in the second column you put how long and how recently you have used that particular skill. You make that page one of your resume. Why? Because the Applicant Tracking System will treat all the keywords on page one as being only in the document and advantage you in the submission.

Do What Recruiters Do

Number five is you take a lot of time to apply. Some firms stop really paying attention to resume submissions if they happen too far after the hand went up. Why do they do that? Real simple: they’re getting hundreds of resumes. Do you expect they’re going to sit there and read all of them before deciding who to interview? No, they don’t do that. They start taking action immediately and eventually they stop paying attention altogether because they have people in flight. Their job is to fill the job and they want to do it as quickly as possible. They don’t want to interview forever. There are tools that will help you with applying quickly, but they won’t tailor your resume, which makes them less than ideal.

Resumes need to be tailored quickly. Also, about cover letters: people send attachments of a cover letter and no one really opens those attachments. Another thing people do is make the font of the resume much too small for a reader. Now, look at my face—do I look like I’m 24? Most people in HR are not 24. For those of you who are veteran individuals trying to cram more details into your resume and making the font smaller and smaller, the human being who’s going to look at the resume—and the system—may have trouble with that. Keep it to at least 10-point, preferably 11 or 12.

Another mistake is embedding your address as a header at the top of the resume. Some systems have trouble with that, so don’t embed a header. The same goes for saying “page 2 of 2.” We’re not reading pages; we’re reading screens. People read screens. They’re not printing out a resume to know that this is the second page. If anything, they really only care about the first page—the page and a quarter, which is two “page downs.” That’s as far as people read. You don’t have to number the pages.

One huge thing people don’t do: I understand why your full addresses aren’t put there because identity theft is an issue, but you must put city, state, and zip code on your resume. When the system parses it, it knows where you are located. Some systems will screen out resumes that don’t include a zip code because they don’t know where you are located. Let’s say they’re trying to fill a position in Savannah, Georgia, and they get a resume with a phone number from anywhere in the country and no location. How do they know if you’re local? You’re not telling them. So, put city, state, and zip code. If you think you’re going to fool people by not including it, they’re just going to screen you out.

Those are a few of the stupid resume mistakes I see. If there are more, enter them as a comment; it’ll help other people. Hope you have a great day. Take care.

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