The 5 Biggest Mistakes I See on Resumes, and How to Correct Them Ive sent out hundreds of resumes over my career, applying for just about every kind of job. Ive personally reviewed more than 20,000 resumes. And at Google we sometimes get more than 50,000 resumes in a single week. I have seen A LOT of resumes. Some are brilliant, most are just ok, many are disasters. The toughest part is that for 15 years, Ive continued to see the same mistakes made again and again by candidates, any one of which can eliminate them from consideration for a job. Whats most depressing is that I can tell from the resumes that many of these are good, even great, people. But in a fiercely competitive labor market, hiring managers dont need to compromise on quality. All it takes is one small mistake and a manager will reject an otherwise interesting candidate. I know this is well-worn ground on LinkedIn, but Im starting here because -- I promise you -- more than half of you have at least one of these mistakes on your resume. And Id much rather see folks win jobs than get passed over. In the interest of helping more candidates make it past that first resume screen, here are the five biggest mistakes I see on resumes. Mistake 1: Typos. This one seems obvious, but it happens again and again. A 2013 CareerBuilder survey found that 58% of resumes have typos. In fact, people who tweak their resumes the most carefully can be especially vulnerable to this kind of error, because they often result from going back again and again to fine tune your resume just one last time. And in doing so, a subject and verb suddenly dont match up, or a period is left in the wrong place, or a set of dates gets knocked out of alignment. I see this in MBA resumes all the time. Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality. The fix? Read your resume from bottom to top: reversing the normal order helps you focus on each line in isolation. Or have someone else proofread closely for you. Mistake 2: Length. A good rule of thumb is one page of resume for every ten years of work experience. Hard to fit it all in, right? But a three or four or ten page resume simply wont get read closely. As Blaise Pascal wrote, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. A crisp, focused resume demonstrates an ability to synthesize, prioritize, and convey the most important information about you. Think about it this way: the *sole* purpose of a resume is to get you an interview. Thats it. Its not to convince a hiring manager to say yes to you (thats what the interview is for) or to tell your lifes story (thats what a patient spouse is for). Your resume is a tool that gets you to that first interview. Once youre in the room, the resume doesnt matter much. So cut back your resume. Its too long. Mistake 3: Formatting. Unless youre applying for a job such as a designer or artist, your focus should be on making your resume clean and legible. At least ten point font. At least half-inch margins. White paper, black ink. Consistent spacing between lines, columns aligned, your name and contact information on every page. If you can, look at it in both Google Docs and Word, and then attach it to an email and open it as a preview. Formatting can get garbled when moving across platforms. Saving it as a PDF is a good way to go. Mistake 4: Confidential information. I once received a resume from an applicant working at a top-three consulting firm. This firm had a strict confidentiality policy: client names were never to be shared. On the resume, the candidate wrote: Consulted to a major software company in Redmond, Washington. Rejected! Theres an inherent conflict between your employers needs (keep business secrets confidential) and your needs (show how awesome I am so I can get a better job). So candidates often find ways to honor the letter of their confidentiality agreements but not the spirit. Its a mistake. While this candidate didnt mention Microsoft specifically, any reviewer knew thats what he meant. In a very rough audit, we found that at least 5-10% of resumes reveal confidential information. Which tells me, as an employer, that I should never hire those candidates ... unless I want my own trade secrets emailed to my competitors. The New York Times test is helpful here: if you wouldnt want to see it on the home page of the NYT with your name attached (or if your boss wouldnt!), dont put it on your resume. Mistake 5: Lies. This breaks my heart. Putting a lie on your resume is never, ever, ever, worth it. Everyone, up to and including CEOs, get fired for this. (Google CEO fired for lying on resumes and see.) People lie about their degrees (three credits shy of a college degree is not a degree), GPAs (Ive seen hundreds of people accidentally round their GPAs up, but never have I seen one accidentally rounded down -- never), and where they went to school (sorry, but employers dont view a degree granted online for life experience as the same as UCLA or Seton Hall). People lie about how long they were at companies, how big their teams were, and their sales results, always goofing in their favor. There are three big problems with lying: (1) You can easily get busted. The Internet, reference checks, and people who worked at your company in the past can all reveal your fraud. (2) Lies follow you forever. Fib on your resume and 15 years later get a big promotion and are discovered? Fired. And try explaining that in your next interview. (3) Our Moms taught us better. Seriously. So this is how to mess up your resume. Dont do it! Hiring managers are looking for the best people they can find, but the majority of us all but guarantee that well get rejected. The good news is that -- precisely because most resumes have these kinds of mistakes -- avoiding them makes you stand out.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:41:31 +0000
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