Your resume represents the first impression you leave on a recruiter or hiring manager, and even small mistakes can cause them to place your resume in the discard pile. Putting in the time and effort needed to ensure that your resume is as polished as possible can help you leave a positive perception of yourself on recruiters and increase your odds of landing an interview. Job hunting is competitive, so don't let a small mistake be the deciding factor between you and another applicant.
In 2009, a survey of 150 executives revealed that 76 percent of them would not consider a resume if it had one or two typos. Furthermore, typos are not the only easy mistakes people make when crafting a resume. Here are a few common resume blunders and tips to avoid falling into such common traps.
Factual Accuracy Matters
Human resources managers are tasked with ensuring resumes are accurate, and leaving out basic information can leave a bad impression. If you worked at a company from November of 2013 to January of 2014, for example, simply stating you worked there from 2013 to 2014 might make a recruiter think you're trying to inflate your work experience. This can hurt your chances of landing an interview.
Take the time needed to be as precise as possible. Call your former employers to verify when you were hired and when you left. If you have trouble tracking down this information from the source, consider checking through your bank statements to see when you were paid. Honesty matters as well, so make sure your references can confirm everything included on your resume. Avoid the temptation to exaggerate your responsibilities and job duties, as HR managers might dig deep when talking to your references.
Tripping Over Typos
Glaring grammatical errors and misspelled words can distract the person reading your resume and give an impression of laziness. It can be easy to miss typos in your own work, so ask a friend to read through your resume before submitting it. Be careful with spell checkers, as they can miss typos. It's easy to misspell "detail" as "derail," for example, and sending a resume with the soft skill point "Keen eye for derail" might make a hiring manager leery.
Be Careful With Jargon
Industry terms in a well-crafted resume can help you demonstrate competency, but be careful of using too much jargon. Your resume still needs to tell a coherent and intriguing story, and inserting too much jargon can make it difficult to read. It can also help to tailor your resume to specific jobs by filtering jargon unrelated to your target position. Fancy words and cutting-edge terms don't show how you can help the company, so get rid of the lingo and focus on pertinent details — including hard numbers — that best demonstrate what you accomplished in the past.
Techniques to Prevent Mistakes
Fortunately, there are a number of steps you can take to avoid common resume mistakes. Find people who can offer an honest assessment. Close friends might be hesitant to give negative feedback, so make sure people you ask are willing to be forthright. It might also be worth consulting with a professional writer or editor with resume experience, and local colleges sometimes have career advisers who can offer feedback. HR professionals can be especially helpful, as they often know what their colleagues look for when reading resumes and may know the latest trends in resume preparation.
Ensure that the most important points in your resume stand out. Make your essential duties at previous jobs easy to locate, and highlight your greatest accomplishments. Hiring managers sometimes get bored reading through resumes for extended periods of time, so try to make yours stand out by writing it to read like a story that logically progresses from one idea to the next. Make sure your formatting is as effective as possible by including white space to break up large chunks of text.
Make a hard copy of your resume and read it to yourself one line or bullet at a time. Read your document aloud to hear how its words sound to your ears. Does your resume still make sense? Does the document represent you well? Make sure you're in the right frame of mind, as working on a resume can quickly become boring. If you're frustrated, take a break, and come back to it with a fresh perspective by taking a walk, getting some exercise, eating lunch or completing some household chores.
No one creates the perfect resume overnight. Take your time to get it right, as even small mistakes can cause a hiring manager or recruiter to toss your resume in the trash. Remember that job hunting is competitive, so don't miss out on a great opportunity by allowing a similarly qualified candidate to present a more polished resume.
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