Top 3 Resume Mistakes

The purpose of a resume is to highlight your skills and explain your employment history, with the goal being to craft a narrative of how your previous experiences have prepared you for a particular position. With that said, while including a polished, detailed list of accomplishments is integral to the application process, so is avoiding three common mistakes on your resume that damage your credibility.

The objective of a resume is to paint a portrait of a confident candidate with excellent and applicable skills. No matter your skills and work history, errors on your resume damage your standing. Resumes should be concise and coherent, inviting hiring managers to invite you for an interview. The job market is competitive enough that employers can afford to reject clearly competent potential hires with sloppy resumes in favor of higher quality candidates.

The first and most obvious common mistake is typos. Grammar, spelling and punctuation errors are easy to overlook but make your resume look sloppy and unprofessional to hiring managers. In a worst case scenario, prospective employers assume you're not detail oriented and don't care about the quality of your performance. Ironically, people who tweak their resumes often are most likely to miss a typo caused by a last-minute change.

A major red flag on a resume is sharing confidential information such as client identities. A common mistake is to honor the letter but not spirit of a confidentiality agreement between you and your current or former employers. However, any prospective employer could interpret the breach in privacy as a sign that you consistently fail to prioritize the needs of the company and cannot be trusted to maintain client confidentiality.

The third biggest, and sadly most common, mistake that appears on resumes is outright lying. No job positions can protect you from a false resume. Common mistakes are to lie about GPAs, degrees, education and work history, but these falsehoods follow you throughout your employment history. In the age of background checks and references, not to mention easy access to Google, prospective employers can catch lies quickly and blacklist resumes on the basis of that alone. At best, a lenient employer may allow you to claim the lie as an error or typo, making you look incompetent instead of deceptive.

Resumes serve multiple purposes, ideally presenting you as a stand-out candidate for the available position. Avoiding these common mistakes already helps significantly as these mistakes appear on over half the resumes submitted to hiring managers. Your resume reflects your ability to write, polish and edit documents, key skills for nearly any job, and oftentimes it serves as the only tool an employer has to form an impression of you. Always keep your resume polished.

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