Don’t make these top ten resume mistakes

I’ve seen hundreds of resumes. However I’ve rarely read one that I haven’t itched to start editing. With resumes, you only get one chance to make a good impression. Here are the top ten most common resume mistakes I see and, because I am nice, I present some tips to overcome them.

It’s difficult to write a decent resume. You need to speak to many audiences. You need instant impact. Yet you also need attention to detail. You need to capture your unique skills and strengths. But if you’ve been retrenched, dismissed or are just plain fed up with your current role, it’s a challenge to find the confidence to claim your achievements, without feeling like a fraud.

1 Your resume is too long or too short

How long should a resume be? You will see so much written on resume length you have to wonder if anyone knows what they are talking about. Last count there were 179,000,000 references on Google to this.

The only tips I have on length are these:

Think about the audience and what you’ll need to present on your resume to have any credibility. Think about why someone will read it. Think about the time they’ll have to spend.

Here are some random examples to show you what I mean:

A one page resume for a senior academic position will not work. In the world of academia being published and referenced counts. So you need to list all your publications to have credibility. That can be a page in itself.

For a marketing role you may only need just a one page list of achievements and a snappy career objective type statement that sells you.

If you’re applying to an airline role as a flight attendant, you can bet your bottom trolley tray that hundreds of people will apply. So you’ll need to have a huge impact on the first page.

Keep in mind that the purpose of a resume is simply to secure you an interview. See my article on  who’s reading your resume for ideas.

2. Your resume is confusing and does not market you

I’ve never found the source of the research that says a recruiter will only scan your resume for 20 seconds or so, but I have seen it happen. What this really means is that you need to spell out what you want, why you want it and what makes you suitable for the job at hand.

Start with a clear career objective, not one that reads like this:

“To maintain job satisfaction by utilising my transferable skills and increasing my knowledge to reach senior management and executive levels.”

Many of us want this. This says a lot but tells me very little about the person.

A career objective can be very simple. You can just state the role that you are after and the type of organization you would like to work within.

It sounds obvious but you do need to tailor it to each role.  (This should be one of my biggest tips) I’ve seen plenty of career objectives on resumes that state a different role to the one advertised. If you do not make your objective current you will miss out, even if everything else on your resume screams hire you.

The career objective above could be better written as:

“To contribute my six years business development experience to a senior account management role within the telecommunications industry; my longer term ambition is to progress to a team management role.”

From a clear career objective, everything on your resume should build an argument for the recruiter to consider you for that role. So in the case above, the writer could then list their achievements and strengths that relate to success in a sales role.

To write a resume that really spells out your suitability, bullet point the top 4 to 5 attributes, skills, experience and knowledge in a career summary or profile under your career objective.

3. Your resume confuses achievements with responsibilities

So many people confuse these two things. Yet it’s critical to understand the difference. A list of achievements above a list of responsibilities will win the battle against blandness, and make your average resume powerful.

Responsibilities are tasks you are required to perform in your role. Achievements are things that you have done above or beyond this. Your achievements can include ideas you have contributed and executed, goals you have exceeded or awards you have won.

To list an achievement you need to state the impact you had. Examples of impact are: where you have increased sales, saved money, improved efficiency, saved customers, improved the customers’ experience, improved the brand or reputation of the company or retained customers.

The example below shows the difference between an achievement and a responsibility on a resume. The role is for a web administrator.

Responsibility

Update the product website with sales and marketing offers

Achievement

Designed new product page layout with new graphics, content and live feeds to improve user experience; received many customer compliments and significantly increased the number of page views

Another thing to think about when you list your achievements is that you need to be specific. The achievement below appeared on the resume of a marketing specialist. This is too general and reads as a responsibility:

“Developed tailored business solutions for global companies to measure the success of marketing and communications initiatives.”

To be more powerful the writer needs to be more specific with which client, which solution and state the impact of the activity. For example:

“Developed new tailored global CRM solution for a major multi million dollar IT client; Solution measured the success of email and e-news campaigns and increased sales results by 12.5%”

One word of warning with achievements. You do not have to list them for every job. If you have a job that doesn’t lend itself to doing anything above the ordinary, then making up an achievement for the sake of listing something, makes you look silly.

4. Your resume oversells your responsibilities

This happens when you are trying to make a job sound more impressive than it actually is.  I saw this statement describe the responsibility of a counter hand role at McDonalds:

“providing high levels of client service.”

While this statement is not incorrect, it is misleading. A client is generally someone whom you deal with more than once. A customer is someone who comes to the counter. Most recruiters know what people do at McDonalds, so this statement just sounds odd.

The person who wrote the above has oversold what they actually did and not mentioned what is really challenging or interesting about their job. Anyone who works at McDonalds for any length of time can generally work well under pressure and serve people in a fast paced and highly measured environment. That’s the interesting part.

When the role is routine (like counter service at McDonalds) the challenges of the environment, or where you perform that role, could be the interesting part to talk about on your resume.  For example:

January 2006 – July 2008 McDonalds – Sydney CBD Counter Attendant

Open 24/7 in the centre of Sydney’s CBD, this store served customers who could often be impatient, intoxicated or aggressive about any delays in service. Starting this role to support my university studies, I needed to consistently meet strict time, sales and service targets.

5. Your resume sets you up to be discriminated against on the basis of your age

Discrimination in many forms does exist. We all have prejudices. You will have no idea about the prejudices of the person who reads your resume. So the best thing to do is to remove the opportunity for anything that you think could be a problem.

You’d be surprised about how many people complain about age discrimination yet still have their date of birth or a high school qualification. My rule of thumb for most resumes for people in the private sector is to go back 15 years, no longer. I also leave the dates off older qualifications, and present these only if they are needed for the role.

This is not avoiding the issue of whether you should proudly proclaim your age and therefore challenge recruiters’ stereotypes and prejudices. I’m suggesting you consider whether your age is relevant to the role at hand. That’s the only thing you need to think about on your resume.

Besides, the best way to challenge prejudices is face to face. You want your resume to give you the opportunity to do that.

6. Your resume sets you up to be discriminated against on the basis of your culture

Many of my clients are from overseas. One of the biggest barriers they face is how to find a job with “no local experience”.  In many cases their resumes let them down. The easy things to fix are spelling and grammar. The harder thing to fix is appropriate expression. Here are some examples of strange things I’ve seen:

“Providing delightful customer service”
“Maintain and strengthen customers”
“Organizing equipments”
“Good skills in…”

Technically there is nothing wrong with the above. However the context is wrong.

If you are new to Australia, one of the major concerns local employers have about employing you, is how well you communicate. Behind this is another concern about how well you’ll fit in. Any incorrect choice of words will fuel any negative stereotypes a recruiter may have about your communication skills.

I receive enough emails from recent arrivals to know cultural stereotyping is a major problem.  If you are new to Australia, the very least you need to do is to have a local professional look over your resume.

7. Your resume has too many words, and the wrong type of words

The biggest enemies of a resume are space and time.

You only have one page to make an impact. So you need to choose the one word that represents what you want to say. Even people who write professionally find this difficult to do when it comes to talking about themselves. Here are some examples of what I mean:

– If you have a list headed: “Responsibilities” then do not write “responsible for” on the very next line
– “in order to” instead of: “to”
– “planning and strategizing” instead of: “planning” or “strategizing”
– “the supply of references will be facilitated upon request” instead of: “references available on request”

Once you’ve written your resume, leave it for a day or so. Then review it and ask yourself if you could say the same thing with a different or fewer words.

Action words are instantly more powerful, not like this example I read recently:

“Daily liaison with senior management, staff and Agencies”

This person liaises, however the purpose of the liaison is unclear.

8. Your resume does not show that you have read the advertisement

The focus of your resume should reflect the focus of the advertised position. You can do this in many ways as I have described in point one. One other small but important thing is to use the key words in the advertisement. This is important for three reasons:

1. It shows you have read the advertisement
2. Your resume will be picked up in any software that scans resumes
3. If the recruiter has given careful thought to the people they would like to attract, then they will be careful about their choice of words in any advertisement. You will stand out if you show the same amount of thought with the words on your resume.

9. You neglect small, but important detail on your resume

Your resume needs to be consistent in grammar, style, expression and format. My pet hate is random capitalization of words. The worst part of this is that it instantly draws attention to the mistake. Here are examples of common incorrect capitalizations:

“Daily liaison with senior management, staff and Agencies”

The agencies should only be capitalized if they are listed by name

“Management of the Corporate Communications marketing and vendor budgets”

Corporate communications is not the title of an organization.

I really loathe ampersands on resumes unless they are necessary for space purposes.

“Coordinate & educate HRMS trainer”

This person had the space to write “and” and expand on how what coordinate and train actually mean.

10. You have used a standard template for your resume

By all means look at the standard templates you’ll find on employment websites, but realize that many other people are doing exactly the same thing. So if you want to look like them, use the template.

There is no cookie cutter approach to presenting a resume. It’s also easy to pick when someone has downloaded and copied words and phrases that are not their own. If you struggle with how to explain a gap, your unique experience or how to present your experience as a strength, then it’s worthwhile investigating what a professional can do.

Should you hire a professional? Yes. For at least the first resume you write. Why? I have met few people who are self aware enough to understand both their unique strengths, and their marketable strengths. A professional resume writer, who sits down with you, and who has industry experience, can help you identify what you should put on your resume, and what you should leave off.

If the last thing you feel like is talking about is what you are good at – a professional writer can help you feel good about yourself again.

For more information on resumes read:

Why a career objective on your resume is important
Watch out for these resume red flags
How long should a resume be?
Seven things you don’t know I know from reading your resume
Even if you’re gorgeous, a photo on your resume may not take you far

Tagged as: resume, resume mistakes, resume tips