1. OBJECTIVE: They’re out of date. They’re usually too short and too “me” focused. A better choice is a “Profile” which should be no more than 7 lines long (otherwise the paragraph is too dense), should combine your skills with your personality, and should describe you. Think about what makes you unique. If you find yourself writing “proven ability,” or “team player,” “highly motivated” and other generic, unoriginal and non-descriptive phrases, try asking your references or previous co-workers what makes you good at what you do.
2. BLAND DETAILS: “Responsibilities included overseeing construction of four hotels in Tri-City area, each 50 floors high.” So what? Did they go up on schedule? Did you bring them in under budget? Did you take all four from site work up or did you pick up two of them mid-project? If you don’t tell the hiring company why you’re the best choice, how will they know?
3. ANOTHER JOB, ANOTHER PARAGRAPH: Don’t keep adding on to your resume job after job, year after year. By the time you’re in your 40s, you need to have weeded out your earlier, unrelated jobs and just list the company and title. Drop your college activities, and leave your degree.
4. REFERENCES: Shouldn’t be listed on your resume, nor should it say “References available on request”. Present them separately when they’re requested. This isn’t about protocol. This is about protecting your references so they aren’t called until you and the company are serious about each other.
5. IT’S NOT A STORY!: Don’t write your resume in the third person, this includes using your name, or the pronoun “I” anywhere. That’s it’s you is implied because it’s your name on top!
6. SKIP THE PERSONAL INFO: You might think your baseball coaching or church choir participation shows you’re a well-rounded person, but they’re irrelevant. If the interviewer wants to know who you are aside from your qualifications, he’ll ask.
7. DEGREE DATE: No matter how old you are, don’t leave the date of when you were graduated off your resume. It looks like you’re hiding something (well, you are, aren’t you?), and then everyone does the math to figure out how old you are. If you’re trying to hide your age by not stating the date, what else might you not be forthcoming about?
8. SPELL CHECK, SPELL CHECK, SPELL CHECK: Spell checking visually by you and someone else, any fewer than three times, isn’t enough. And don’t forget to check your punctuation.
9. GETTING IT OUT THERE – part one: If it’s an ad, you probably have instructions as to how to send it. If it says email, cut and paste it in the form, and attach it as a .pdf. You don’t know what it will look like on the other end because of the variety of settings available to each user. Quite frankly, you’re better off not emailing it at all, but unfortunately – besides not sending it – sometimes that’s your only choice. Emailing your resume takes any option for further participation right out of your hands, because often there’s no name given for a follow up contact. You’ve no other option than to wait and wonder.
10. GETTING IT OUT THERE – part two: If you know the name of the company, call and ask if they prefer email, fax, or snail mail. I know a recruiter whose email was listed in The Kennedy Guide to Executive Recruiters. He received hundreds of resumes emailed to him cold (so not pro-active!) and simply mass deleted them every morning. I’ll bet less than 10% of those people bothered to follow up to see if it was received (this isn’t a numbers game)! Candidates he contacted for a specific search received an entirely different email address. How about that?
11. VISUALS: Ivory paper. Black ink. Individual pages. No plastic. Your resume is a professional document, not a school book report or an art project. Until every resume is done this way, yours will still stand out in the crowd.
You are the product, and your resume is the brochure. To find your perfect job you must differentiate yourself from the others who are also vying for attention. Your resume tells your story of who you are, how you make decisions and how well you do what you do.
Your resume must be specific, individualized, easy to skim to invite a closer reading, and focused on the accomplishments you’ve achieved with – and for – each previous employer. This tells the hiring company what you can do for them – and it is about the hiring company, not you.
The resume is what gets you in the door. If it’s poorly written, looks sloppy, is difficult to read, is cryptic, or necessitates being slogged through, you’ll be tossed aside and forgotten. And how can you decide if you want the company, when they’ve already decided they don’t want you?
Judi Perkins
Judi Perkins, the How-To Career Coach, was a recruiter for 22 years and worked with hundreds of hiring authorities on entry level through CEO. She set up over 15,000 interviews, and has seen over half a million resumes. Her clients often find jobs 8 – 12 weeks because she brings them sequence, structure and focus, and shows why typical strategies often fail. She’s been on PBS’s Frontline, Good Morning Connecticut, in Smart Money magazine, CareerBuilder, MSN Careers, Yahoo Hot Jobs, New York Times, New York Daily News, multiple radio shows including a regular Thursday morning gig, and quoted in numerous career books. Sign up for her free newsletter at www.FindthePerfectJob.com.
Joshua Waldman
Margaret Buj
Laura Smith-Proulx
If you are going to email your resume, make sure you send it as a PDF instead of a Word document. You’ll know that the spacing remained the same and that it looks the way you want it to look.
Hi Mary:
Thanks for bringing that up – it’s a good point. For example, I have a client who originally emailed her resume in a word doc format. She’s on the creative side of things and does design work etc. I don’t know what her original resume looked like becuase it came out my end on courier or helveticaw hich
is what usually happens if the font doesn’t match on the other side. Consequently her resume looked
even worse than it would have anyway (spacing, formatting, some other things).
Judi
There seems to be a difference of opinion on whether to include year of graduation on the resume. Some professional recruiters discourage including this info. It can distract the resume reader from focusing on your relevant job experience and other key parts of the resume as they mentally calculate how old you are from the year of graduation.
Hi William:
Yes, that’s true. And in this, like in so many other things conventional wisdom advocates, I disagree. The other part of the broad overview of why I recommend putting your date on there is that if a company isn’t going to hire someone who’s over a certain age, then bringing you in and visually seeing that you’re over the age they want isn’t going to change that.
“But what if I can wow them with my experience?” you ask. Good question. That just cemented they won’t hire you. Age isn’t about age – it’s about salary. And if you’re “old,” then you’re “overqualified” which means you’re going to want more than they want to pay.
And if you don’t go the “overqualified” route and wow them with your experience, then if that’s too different from what’s on yoru resume, they’ll be wary of hiring you becuase you’re willing to take a cut in pay and will conclude you’ll keep looking and won’t be around long.
So why not just be who you are, put the date on there, and go look for the companies who are looking for experience, and let the rest of them weed you out? (BTW – that’s a rhetorical question)
William, did you join my community? I’ve got a very loyal following and lots of people refer others to me because while I’m off center from conventional wisdom, my clients, and other people from my community, are getting hired, some in just a few weeks or months, depending on how much the work with me. Plus you’ll get a cool resume report based on the half million I’ve seen! http://www.FindthePerfectJob.com
Thanks for your comment William
Judi
I have read many resumes over the years and your comments are on target. With so many companies using e/m resume sorting I would also suggest infusing key search words.
Hi Ralph:
Thanks for that! Yes, key words are essential but in some cases, hard to avoid anyway. If you’ve been doing the work in that function or industry, they’re going to be there to some degree. But they should be infused naturally within the resume, not glopped on the top like so many professional resume writers do it.
Additionally, I’ve worked with a lot of clients who have paid to have their resumes done (by someone else), and either a) it hasn’t been working or b) they’re uncomfortable with the finished product. The first one – A – is a different reason from key words, and thus irrelevant in this post. But B is often because – in those keywords glopped on top – there are a whole bunch that aren’t really true, or in context, with the person who owns the resume. They’re overstated. Or overdone. Or both.
And so I work with them to reshape their resume and help them to understand better how and why the first one didn’t work and the reshape (so to speak) will. As a result, they feel more comfortable with the resume, because it better represents who they are and they begin to see the results they weren’t seeing before they came to me.
I appreciate your comment and bringing up the importance of keywords, a word which by itself, can freak people out as they’re usually not sure if they have enough! But if the resume is done well and done right, and really represents who the person is, then it’s almost impossible to write a resume without keywords.
What do you think, Ralph? And by the way, how’s your resume?
And as I mentioned to William above (and forgot to ask Mary) please join my community! http://www.FindthePerfectJob.com
Thanks for your comment
Judi