Top Five Resume No No’s

Top Five Resume No No’s

          Certainly, there is no such thing as the “perfect” resume. Every person is different with different backgrounds, skills; and knowledge; in other words – what works for me might not work for you or anyone else either.  There is no “right” resume, but there are definitely wrong ones.  Here are five things that should never be on your resume, at least if you want to get an interview.

1. Objective statements

These are out – O U T – out.  Objective statements are great at telling the reader what you want, but I have news for you bucko, they don’t care what you want.  They need to understand what you offer, not what you want.  Can you do the job? Can you deliver value for the compensation they are giving you?  In short, why should they hire you? And it isn’t because you want to be a team player and contributor.

2. “Responsible for”

Every job has responsibilities and obviously you must have been able to deliver on them, or you wouldn’t have held your last job for four years.  These days to get hired, you need to accomplish something, not be responsible for it. You were responsible for a budget of $5MM. So what? Did you come in under budget and save money? Did you bring more to the table for that amount of money? Did you create, deploy, sell, buy <INSERT SOMETHING HERE> that made the company better?

3. Mistakes

Spelling, grammar, formatting, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  It has always been the case that mistakes on a resume dramatically cut down the likelihood that you will be called.  Nowadays, when there are dozens, if not hundreds of applicants for the same position errors are a quick and easy way for the hiring manager or HR to parse the stack and lessen the number of resumes they need to read.  Have an independent third party proof your resume for you, submit it to a proofreading service, read it backwards (this really works) to make sure there are zero mistakes. If English isn’t your native language, this is doubly important.

4. More than two pages

This one isn’t a never.  But, I have written more than 10,000 resumes; and my team has written thousands more, and I would say that a very small percentage of the clients we have collectively worked with could justify more than two pages.  While I am sure everything you have ever done in your career is very, very, very important you must think about it from the other side of the desk.  Do you really think they want to read page three, four, five or seven hundred?  I will give you a hint – they don’t.

5. Personal information

I could easily fill an entire blog with lists of personal things that I have seen on resumes, that just don’t belong there – but a short list will suffice to get the point across – date of birth, height, weight, 27 hobbies, political affiliation, religion, family pictures, names of kids, names of pets, names of kids’ pets – don’t think for a minute I am making this up – any of it.  The bottom line is you are applying for a job, not a lifelong friendship. There are many reasons why these things don’t belong on a resume, but the number one reason is you won’t get called. Hiring managers find this irksome, among many other things.

So, some homework – pull your resume out and see if you have any of the above five faux pas on your documents.  Well…?

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