w**z
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-mistakes-i-see-on-resumes-and-how-to-correct-them?trk=tod-home-art-list-
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I've sent out hundreds of resumes over my career, applying for just about
every kind of job. I've 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, I've continued to see the same mistakes made again and
again by candidates, any one of which can eliminate them from consideration
for a job. What's 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 don't 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 I'm starting here because -
- I promise you -- more than half of you have at least one of these mistakes
on your resume. And I'd 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 don't 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 won't 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. That's it. It's
not to convince a hiring manager to say "yes" to you (that's what the
interview is for) or to tell your life's story (that's what a patient spouse
is for). Your resume is a tool that gets you to that first interview. Once
you're in the room, the resume doesn't matter much. So cut back your resume.
It's too long.
Mistake 3: Formatting. Unless you're 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! There's an inherent conflict between your employer's
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. It's a
mistake. While this candidate didn't mention Microsoft specifically, any
reviewer knew that's 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 wouldn't want to see it on
the home page of the NYT with your name attached (or if your boss wouldn't!)
, don't 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
(I've 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 don't 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. Don't do it! Hiring managers are
looking for the best people they can find, but the majority of us all but
guarantee that we'll get rejected.
The good news is that -- precisely because most resumes have these kinds of
mistakes -- avoiding them makes you stand out.
In a future post, I'll expand beyond what not to do, and cover the things
you *should* be doing to make your resume stand out from the stack. |
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