By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
This is about the dirty dozen of resume mistakes. And I want to be clear, I’m not going to cover a couple of things like, you know not to have spelling and grammatical errors, or using the same resume for every job you apply for, or in the United States of having a photo on your resume. Other countries where it’s more of a convention, yes, but in the US no photos.
Now, let me go through the Dirty Dozen here, because I just see too many resumes, certainly when I did recruiting all those years, and now, today, as a coach, I just see so many of these mistakes show up time and time again.
Salary requirements are included in your resume. If you put salary requirements in your resume, you’re putting yourself in the position of being decided upon much too early as to whether you have a value for that price, rather than drawing people in to meet you and then determining whether or not you are worth that amount of money. All they have is the resume to go by. Don’t include your salary requirements in the resume.
Number two is incorrect or missing contact information. Yes, I understand we sometimes make mistakes, but not including a way for people to contact you is foolish on your part. Name, city, state, zip code, email address, phone numbers. I say “phone numbers” just in case you’re one of those landline people AND you have a mobile phone. But always have a phone number there. Always include your email address; always include city, state and zip code. And I mentioned zip code, in particular, because zip code allows people to search for you in their tracking systems in the future. They probably don’t want to talk to people who might be in Miami, if the job is in New Jersey. They can narrow things down by zip code.
Having an unprofessional email address. Sorry, some of you still do that. I’m not saying you should be boring or bland. But you don’t have to telegraph that you’re an imbecile with your email address.
Having outdated or irrelevant information, much too much of it in the resume. For those of you who are older, outdated information shows that you’re a dinosaur, and that you’re still roaming the earth. Who cares what you did in The Stone Ages. They care about what you’ve done in your most recent job and maybe the one before that. Emphasize that experience. Even within that, the amount of irrelevant information that people include dilutes their capability around, what it is the client is looking for, the company is looking for. Emphasize that part of your background (that what it is they want), versus all the ancillary things.
Failing to demonstrate and quantify results. How do they know what your impact has been? So for example, that translates into money saved, or money earned or percentage improvement over what existed there.
“We increased revenue by $20 million.” That’s one measure. Another measure would be by $2 million, or $200,000, or $200 million or $2 billion. Notice your impact is is different when you hear the different numbers. They think that way, as well.
Over buzzwording your resume, and doing what’s obvious keyword stuffing into the resume. Think of making your communications about technology and terms conversational rather than blowing it up with a lot of keywords linked together without context.
Next, and I kind of alluded to this earlier or when I spoke about irrelevant information–not customizing your resume to match the job listing. When you think about it, for so many people, they flip the same resume to every single job with the result being, it just doesn’t match up. And, like the broken watch that’s right twice a day, you get some interviews, but not as many as you really should. So, tailor your resume to demonstrate your fit for the role.
Next thing is your format or design is too elaborate. Now, I understand if you’re in a design role, you want to show a bunch of stuff, but can their systems (if they’re using systems to receive the resume) accept it, parse it and make your document look good in their system or is it just going to be a colossal mess? For most systems, they struggle with elaborate design. You can submit a more standard resume into their systems, and if offered, the opportunity to attach, do that. And you can also have a link back to the more elaborate resume.
Next, dense blocks of text that are very difficult to read. Just because it’s so blocky. There’s no whitespace around information, or you use way too many bullet points in the resume.
Your resume’s much too long. You push relevant information way down on page two, and they want to see it closer to the top of page one. When you have a four-page resume, who looks at page four? Seriously, who looks at page four? And I understand there are fields where there are exceptions to this. But for most of you, your resume being too long, is a colossal mistake. You’re just vomiting onto a page.
You use objective statements. They don’t care what your objective is. They care about what it is you can do that solves their problem. Your objective statement is limiting for you. For example, I want to be a manager working with a team of X number of people in an organization committed to excellence and career advancement for its staff. What did you just say there? You can find this out in the course of conversation. Plus your definition of each of those variables can be different than theirs and be correct at the same time. But you put up an unnecessary roadblock.
Lastly, you’re including too much irrelevant or unrelated information. They don’t care about lots of extraneous things. They care about whether you can solve their problem. And in doing so, they want to feel like you’re competent, self confident, have character, chemistry, suggests or offer a hint of a charismatic personality. They want to know that you care so that they can trust you. They want to hire people that they can trust.
And that’s the long the short of some of the dirty dozen of resume mistakes people make.
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2022
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2200 episodes.
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