Resume Writing Sins: Are You Guilty?
Every smart professional knows an updated resume is a key growth and career management tool. When opportunity knocks for promotions, when their job suddenly evaporates or when a recruiter comes calling, they are ready. Unfortunately, many smart professionals have no idea if their resume sucks or not. With that in mind, check the resume writing tips below.
Using the following checklist, where does your resume stand on the suckiness scale? Does your resume commit any of these terrible 12 sins?
A 12-Step Resume Triage Checklist
1. Too long — more than two pages for 10 or fewer years of experience, more than three pages 10+ years of experience
2. Contact info is hard to find or is in an unusual place, like off to the side or at the bottom of the page
3. Typos, poor grammar, misspellings
4. Too many acronyms (company or industry specific)
5. Functional resume vs. reverse-chronological order (recruiters generally really dislike functional resumes, a lot!)
6. Font too small to read easily, use a 10-12 point (depending on the font) in a conventional, easy-to-read font, like Arial or Times.
7. Includes unusual formatting or fancy graphs
8. The pages are too crowded; there’s not enough white space
9. Lacks a summary statement that succinctly states what you can do for their company.
10. Includes an objective statement, which is all about you. A company is concerned only about what you can do for them, so leave it out.
11. No accomplishments are listed; accomplishments need to be listed and quantified in terms of numbers, percents and dollar amounts.
12. Contains lies or exaggerations about your degrees, certifications or accomplishments. Please don’t cut and paste job descriptions for jobs you never had on your resume.
This “terrible 12 sins” checklist is more resume triage than an all-inclusive list. If your resume is guilty of any of these sins, it sucks. If so, you should do something about it ASAP. Passing this checklist still doesn’t guarantee a good resume, but at least it won’t suck.
12 Resume Writing Tips – Sins to avoid?
Connie Dorigan, Founder and Director of Recruiting, sees the food processing industry as the link between good living and good people. She’s the west coast’s most experienced and trusted food processing recruiter. She also provides Executive and Career Coaching and lots of free job search tools. Once you’ve connected with Connie, you’ll always be connected.
© 2018 Connie Dorigan. All rights reserved.
This is a general interest article and does not constitute specific or legal advice.
