Last week I revealed 5 of the most serious mistakes that people make when they produce their own resume. Here is a link :
In the second part of this report, I will uncover another 5 serious mistakes that you may make, which may cause your resume to be rejected by an employer.
Overwritten – long paragraphs and sentences
If you have very long sentences / paragraphs in your resume, this makes it very difficult to read quickly. Time is of the essence if you want to impress the employer and gain an interview. Always try to keep your sentences short and punchy. Use bullet points and ‘white’ space in your CV to break up the information into manageable chunks.
Too much detail or too little information
Remember, that you have to impress the reader in just 10 to 20 seconds. If you have included too much detail on your resume then an employer may struggle to gain a quick understanding of your experience and capabilities, and simply reject your resume. Including too little or the wrong sort of information on your resume will mean that an employer won’t know whether you have the relevant experience and skills to do the job. They will quickly move on to the next resume in the pile. You need to identify exactly what employers are looking for, ensuring you have included the right sort of information about your current and previous jobs, and detailing your relevant experience, abilities and achievements.
Resume doesn’t directly target the job you are applying for
When you are sending your resume to a company or a recruitment agency, always make sure you include a covering letter.
In the letter (or more likely an email nowadays) you must tell them why you are the right candidate for the job and why they should employ you, rather than all the other people who have applied. This may all sound rather obvious to you, but you would be surprised at the number of people who send only the briefest of cover letters that merely says, “Please find enclosed my resume”. Too many people send a resume to a company without any thought for the person who will be reading their resume. You may also want to make changes to your resume, so that it more closely matches the job that you are applying for. The closer your resume and cover letter comes to matching an employer’s requirements, the more likely you are to be offered an interview. However, don’t just use the exact same words and phrases from the job posting. This is a recipe for disaster, as it may lead the employer to reject your resume, because they will think that you are a
‘fake’ who has simply copied their posting. If you are making a speculative application, you will need to write
a particularly good cover letter to make the company sit up and take notice of you.
Misspellings, typographical errors, poor grammar
It is said that over half of all resumes contained spelling and grammatical errors. Keep in mind that recruiters are looking for reasons to reject the applicant, and bad spelling and grammar are near the top of the list. As soon as the recruiter can reject those not suitable, they can spend more time reviewing candidates that have prepared a good quality resume. If a candidate can’t be bothered to check their spelling, then they are not going to be bothered to do a good job for the company. Errors in your resume can detract from an otherwise good resume and make you look lazy or careless – not the sort of qualities you want to portray to an employer. This may give an employer just the excuse they need to reject your resume. You should carefully read through your resume, checking for errors and do run your word-processor’s built-in spelling and grammar checker. You should also get several other people to check your resume too, because a spelling and grammar checker won’t find every error.
Test, test and test again, to get that interview
If you’ve produced your own resume, then you can’t expect it to be 100% successful the very first time you use it to apply for a job. Let’s look at an analogy in the car industry. When a new model of a car is first manufactured, it is rigorously road-tested to improve the car and ensure that every component works correctly, both individually and together. Components are replaced when they fail, don’t work correctly or when a superior alternative becomes available. Just like a car your resume needs to be thoroughly road-tested and the bits that aren’t working correctly need to be fixed, replaced or
improved. You should thoroughly check your own resume and then show it to friends, colleagues, family members, recruiters and employers. Does your resume pass the 20 second test and grab the reader’s attention? What do people like? What don’t they like? How can your resume be improved? The only real test, of course, is to actually use your resume to apply for jobs. If your resume has been unsuccessful, try and get feedback from the employer or recruiter and then rework your resume accordingly.
Are you looking for an expert to review your resume? Send me an email – proreswriter (at) gmail - and I would be happy to conduct a thorough resume evaluation for Free.
Thanks for the comment Sandy. I have visited your site and you provide some good practical advice on selecting online colleges…which is valuable as well
Hope to see you stop by again..
Hi Dan,
I absolutely agree with every suggestion you’ve mentioned in your article!
I teach online communications courses and in one of these classes, we work on resumes. I find it absolutely astounding how little some people really know about creating a successful resume.
Advice like yours is very practical and helpful!
Thanks!