Quick and Quintessential Guide: 50 Resume Blunders to Avoidkatharinehansenphd.com/50ResumeBlunders.pdf · 50 Resume Blunders to Avoid Partnering with Recruiters for Job-Search Success

Quick and Quintessential Guide: 50 Resume Blunders to Avoid

by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.

Quintessential Careers Press a division of Quintessential Careers, Kettle Falls, WA 99141 Publisher: Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.Associate Publisher/Creative Director: Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.

Cover Design by Melanie Nicosia Interdonato

Copyright © 2014 by Quintessential Careers

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained in this book.

Produced in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-934689-69-1 | 1-934689-69-6

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The Quick and Quintessential Guide Series

Tap here to learn the current publication status of each title

Cracking the Hidden Job Market The Best-Kept Networking Secret Words to Get Hired By Cover Letters on the Cutting Edge Frequently Asked Questions about Job Interviewing Planning a Stellar Resume Pitching Yourself to Employers with 7-Step Selling Demystifying Job-Interview Questions 50 Resume Blunders to Avoid Partnering with Recruiters for Job-Search Success Selling Your Skills to Land a Job Success for Mature Job-Seekers Discovering Your Career Passion Landing Job Offers through Post-Interview Followup Best Career Strategies for Women Breezing through Background Checks Delivering Stellar Presentations Avoiding Unspeakable Job-Interview Behaviors The Career Path Wrapped Inside Your Life Story Storied Job-Search Communication that Connects with Employers Branding Your Resume Targeting and Researching Your Next Employer Scoring Big in Your Long-Distance Job Search Online Portfolios: Your 24/7 Proof of Performance Beating the Resume Black Hole Career Success through Online Presence and Offline Essence … and more to come

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Cracking-Hidden-Job-Market.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Best-Kept-Networking-Secret.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Words-to-Get-Hired-By.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Cutting-Edge-Cover-Letters.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Job-Interviewing-FAQ.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Planning-Stellar-Resume.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Pitching-to-Employers.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/Quick-Guides/Demystifying-Job-Interview-Questions.html

Contents Introduction: Maybe It’s Your Resume

Chapter 1: Issues with Resume Focus and Specificity 1. Blunder: Resume is not tailored to the targeted vacancy. 2. Blunder: Resume is unfocused. 3. Blunder: Resume contains an objective statement. 4. Blunder: Resume is too general. 5. Blunder: Resume fails to address critical requirements.

Chapter 2: Flawed Content 6. Blunder: Resume is duties-driven rather than accomplishments-driven. 7. Blunder: Resume content lacks measurable results. 8. Blunder: Resume is so full of quantitative data that it’s hard to read. 9. Blunder: Resume fails to showcase targeted skills. 10. Blunder: Resume contains spelling errors, typos, and grammatical flaws. 11. Blunder: Resume is too wordy, contains too much information. 12. Blunder: Resume is written in third-person. 13. Blunder: Resume does not list phone number, only an e-mail address, or has

inappropriate e-mail address. 14. Blunder: Resume contains the personal pronoun “I.” 15. Blunder: Resume contains inexplicable acronyms and industry-specific jargon. 16. Blunder: Resume language is replete with “fluff,” flowery words, and “resume

speak” instead of specifics. 17. Blunder: Resume language is egotistical and self-congratulatory. 18. Blunder: Content focuses on soft skills at the expense of hard data. 19. Blunder: Span of work experience in a given job is listed with years only instead

of with months and years or is listed inconsistently from job to job. 20.Blunder: Not enough description of the scope of a given job is provided beyond

the job’s title. 21. Blunder: Jobs are omitted from the resume. 22.Blunder: Disproportionate space or verbiage is devoted to older jobs. 23.Blunder: The exact same verbiage is used to describe functions in different jobs. 24.Blunder: Resume fails to list educational credentials. 25. Blunder: Resume contains personal information. 26.Blunder: Resume contains long lists of awards, trainings, and similar items. 27. Blunder: Resume contains lies or misleading statements or misrepresentations. 28.Blunder: Facts stated in one part of the resume are not supported elsewhere. 29.Blunder: Resume items are listed in an order that doesn’t consider the reader’s

interest. 30.Blunder: Resume lacks links to social-media-profiles. 31. Blunder: Resume contains non-parallel construction. 32.Blunder: References are listed directly on your resume. 33. Blunder: Resume contains content that should never be listed on a resume.

34.Blunder: Resume contains negative information. 35. Blunder: Resume verbs are weak.

Chapter 3: Flawed Formatting or Appearance 36.Blunder: Resume has poor or inconsistent formatting, unclear layout. 37. Blunder: Too many fonts appear in the resume. 38.Blunder: Resume is too long. 39.Blunder: Resume is one page, but too much is crammed onto the page, or

formatting and appearance are sacrificed to fit content on the page. 40.Blunder: Margins are too narrow or wide. 41. Blunder: Resume buries important job-relevant skills at the bottom. 42.Blunder: Resume is not bulleted. 43.Blunder: Resume has too many bullet points. 44.Blunder: Resume uses a cookie-cutter design based on an overused resume

template. 45. Blunder: Resume is cluttered.

Chapter 4: Flawed Strategy 46.Blunder: Resume is in a functional format or otherwise lacks dates. 47. Blunder: Resume file name is “Resume.doc” or “Resume.pdf.” 48.Blunder: Resume is not accompanied by a cover letter or cover letter is not

targeted to the open position.

Chapter 5: Your Resume is not ATS-ready 49.Blunder: Resume lacks keywords. 50.Blunder: Resume contains formatting that will prevent its being read by ATS.

Afterword

Introduction: Maybe It’s Your Resume Are employers contacting you for job interviews?

If not, maybe your resume is the problem.

This book is designed to help you diagnose resume problems, covering 50 of the most common and most significant resume blunders.

It is also intended to help you fix those issues.

Before we launch into the 50 blunders, it’s important to distinguish the ways resumes are submitted because the method of submission makes some blunders more significant with one means of submission than they are with the other. These are the two major categories we’re talking about:

A “print” resume, which is typically printed out and used in networking situations, taken to interviews, and mailed via postal mail (or faxed) to the dwindling number of companies who prefer to receive resumes that way.

An electronic resume that is typically posted to a job board, and employer’s career Web site, or sent via email to an employer. The vast majority of resumes submitted to employers are processed by software called Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).

To illustrate the differences in blunder significance, take resume length. While debate continues to rage about whether resumes should be more than one page, page length is much less significant when resumes are entered into Applicant Tracking Systems than when they are printed out and read by the human eye. An electronic resume should still be as concise as possible, but its actual number of pages isn’t especially relevant when “read” electronically.

Similar distinctions apply to resume formatting and appearance. For a print resume, tasteful, attractive formatting that distinguishes the resume’s appearance is desirable. Such formatting might include a couple of fonts – with some content items set off in bold or italics – rule lines, tables, indented or centered content, and even charts or graphs. But that kind of formatting would wreak havoc on a resume being submitted to an Applicant Tracking System, probably rendering the document barely readable to the ATS.

As applicable, I will describe in this book how each blunder relates to print vs. electronic resumes.

Chapter 1: Issues with Resume Focus and Specificity 1. Blunder: Resume is not tailored to the targeted vacancy.

Blunder applies equally to print and electronic resumes.

Shawn Slevin, HR and human capital solutions provider for Chair Swim Strong Foundation in the New York City area, called resumes that are the same for every position “cookie cutter.” Instead, your resume should closely match the requirements of the job you are targeting. When targeting a job advertised by a corporate recruiter in a specific company, demonstrate in your resume that you’ve researched that organization and can tie your accomplishments to the employer’s needs. As recruiter Lisa De Benedittis, president of Elite Staffing Services in the San Diego area, noted: “Resumes are auditions without the benefit of you being around. I will decide if you are a match for my job/client within 20 seconds. Your resume will speak volumes about your communication skills. Do you use words to demonstrate your value or is it boilerplate? Did you put thought and effort into this audition?”

2. Blunder: Resume is unfocused.


Can the readers of your resume discern – by glancing at it for just a few seconds – what you want to do in your next job and the most important selling point(s) you bring to that job? If not, you’ve committed the blunder of an unfocused resume.

To ensure a sharp focus, you will likely need to create multiple versions of your resume, building one or more boilerplate versions that you then customize to each specific positions. That doesn’t mean you have to rewrite your resume for each opening, but you do need to tweak it and focus it toward the specific opportunity to show that you are a fit for any vacancy to which you send your resume. You’ll be moving things around, adjusting words and phrases, and adding a focus and dimension to your resume that will make both hiring managers and applicant-screening software programs take notice. By tailoring your resume to each job, each employer, you’ll appear better qualified – and a better fit – than those job-seekers who do not tailor their resumes. Your resume must be a collection of accomplishments and achievements from your previous work experiences, volunteering, college/grad school, and the like. If your resume is simply a rehash of job duties and responsibilities, no amount of tailoring will help. Presenting your skills, accomplishments, qualifications, and other selling points in the best light possible will all come more easily if you have in mind an overall focus for your resume.

The result of this process should be a resume that illustrates your accomplishments in terms that the employer understands, showing how your achievements, and qualifications match directly to the requirements and job description of the job you seek.

A broad overview of the steps to a focused, tailored resume follows: Step 1: Search Google, Indeed, and other job sites for job listings for the job you seek. Once you’ve gathered at least five of these job postings, analyze the common qualifications each employer seeks. Modify your basic resume with this new information, especially keeping note of keywords and phrases and industry jargon/buzzwords. Also note if you are missing one or more of those key qualifications; if so, your next step may be gaining the additional skills, experience, or education/training required – or ignoring that qualification on your resume; never lie about a qualification you don’t have. Step 2: Once you are ready to apply to job postings, review the job descriptions and required qualifications and make edits to your resume – especially the top portion of the document (more about this section coming up). Next, to portray your accomplishments, draw from the wording the employer uses to describe the ideal candidate. Your result should be a resume that mirrors the requirements the employer seeks. Another neat trick is using the job title (and number/ID) in the headline of your resume. Still annother effective method for branding yourself is with the file name of your resume. Save your resume with the employer’s name in the file name, such JaneJobSeekerResume-Apple. Or include your name and a brief branding label – such as “JaneGreene–SalesProfessional.” Step 3: Nothing resonates more with a hiring manager than reading a resume that uses phrasing that mirrors language used by the employer. A very simple way to add an extra level of effectiveness to your resume is judiciously modifying some of the ways you describe yourself and your experiences using some of the same words and phrases the organization uses to describe itself. (Don’t go overboard here; employers are turned off if you copy and paste huge hunks of job descriptions into your resume). For example, a job-seeker applying for a position with the Walt Disney Company might include words such as “magic,” “dreams,” “innovation,” “excellence” (based on how the company describes itself on its Web site) in describing yourself.

Spend some time on each prospective employer’s Web site – and/or review any organizational literature. You’ll want to seek out common words the employer uses to describe its culture, organizational philosophy, and employees. Some employers have amazingly rich career/job sections on their corporate Websites that go into great detail about organizational values, culture... and some even include quotes and testimonials from current employees. Take some of the words each employer uses to describe itself and its employees and use those words on your tailored resume.

Step 4: Turn to your network and find leads to people who work in the field – and, ideally, people who work for your targeted employers. If possible, schedule informal discussions and/or informational interviews so that you can glean even more insider information – and ideally additional insights and keywords that you can use to again modify and sharpen your tailored resume.

There is no excuse to EVER send a generic, untailored resume to an employer. Not only will it be a great waste of your time, but you’ll continue to be frustrated with your lack of results. Tailoring your resume is as simple as outlined in this section – and the time and effort to conduct the research you need to dramatically improve your resume is minimal when compared to the better results you’ll get. Always remember that employers do not just want to hire anyone off the streets – they want to believe they have hired the ideal candidate ... the perfect fit for the job opening. If you’re applying to a number of job openings, you’ll end up with a collection of slightly different resumes – but remember to keep each of them so that when you are invited for the interview, you can review your copy ... and print additional versions of it to bring to the interview. Note: If you’re applying to types of jobs that are radically different from each other, you’ll need to start the tailoring process with multiple “boilerplate” resumes that are different from each other before you even add any employer-specific tailoring. Each basic boilerplate version will focus on the skills and experiences needed for each job type. You can use this same tailoring technique for career and job fairs. Learn what employers are attending that you want to meet with and develop tailored resumes for each recruiter.

The nitty-gritty on creating your resume’s focal point. Not only does every resume need to be specifically tailored to an opening; it also needs a focal point – a device (or set of devices) that instantly tells a hiring decision-maker what job or type of job the candidate seeks and what his or her top selling points are.

Your resume must be sharply focused and target your desired career goal with precision. Job-seekers tend to forget that employers review resumes extremely quickly – often in just a few seconds. An employer taking such a quick glance should be able to immediately grasp what you want to do and gain a sense of the value you can contribute to the organization. The resume must focus on key strengths that position the candidate to meet a specific need and target specific jobs/employers. In other words, employers don’t consider resumes that aren’t focused on a job’s specific requirements to be competitive. Employers and recruiters expect your resume to be precisely tailored to the position you’re applying for. The reader should be able to tell at a glance exactly what job you’re targeting and what need you will fill. The reader should never have to guess or wade through copious text to determine what job you want and what you’d be good at.

An unfocused resume is a time-waster for the employer. At no time has the need for a resume focal point been more apparent than when The Ladders conducted an “eye-tracking” study that pinpoints 6 seconds as the average time recruiters spend looking at a resume before they make the initial “fit/no fit” decision.

3. Blunder: Resume contains an objective statement.


For many years, the objective statement served the purpose of providing a focal point for resumes. Objectives, however are out of fashion with employers – largely because they have tended to be poorly written and woefully vague, thus defeating the purpose of including an objective. Job-seekers also often mistook the objective as an invitation to list everything wanted, needed, and desired from the sought-after job, instead of an opportunity to describe potential contributions to the employer’s bottom line.

Most people in hiring positions do not read Objective statements. “Omit objective statements [because] the applicant, as a matter of principle, has no objective; the company has the objective,” advised senior IT recruiter John Kennedy. “Whatever you write, your objective is to get a job,” said Alison, a corporate recruiter for a specialized information provider. “I can never figure out why people think employers are breathlessly waiting to provide them with opportunities,” noted Joy Montgomery, owner of Structural Integrity in California, citing a typically poor objective statement:

Objective: A challenging position where I am able to use my considerable something-or-other skills in a fulfilling opportunity ...

Similarly, Weaver offered this self-serving and slightly exaggerated objective statement as a typically weak example:

Objective: Seeking to obtain a position within a growing company where my existing skills will benefit my employer, and be part of an environment where I will be challenged so that I may gain even more experience.

So, what do job-seekers now use instead of an objective statement? A Resume Focal Point. It’s also important to understand that the Resume Focal Point is not any one entity or section or your resume; it may be one or more of several possible sections, and the choice of which sections to include will vary from job-seeker to job-seeker and situation to situation. Many hiring managers confess to not having the time to scan more than the first third (at most) of any resume; so you may need to add and rearrange elements on your resume. For the most part, though, your Resume Focal Point will appear in the top third of the first page of your resume, where it will – within 6 seconds – attract the

attention of the hiring decision-maker and provide the crucial information about whether you fit the job opening. Here is your menu of choices for your Resume Focal Point:

• Resume Headline • Resume Branding Statement • “Objectiveless” Resume Objective • Summary of Qualifications” or “Professional Profile” Section

Read on for descriptions and how-tos.

Headline: While – as we’ve seen – hiring decision-makers pay virtually no attention to Objective Statements these days, the headline technique can be effective in telling the recipient immediately what job or type of job you’re targeting. Consider starting with a headline atop your resume (right under your contact information) that identifies the name of the job or type of job you seek. Responding to a specific job posting? Use the exact position title of the job as your headline. One example, “Top Producing Sales Professional.” You can follow the headline with a more detailed branding statement and/or a qualifications summary. Under “Top Producing Sales Professional,” the follow-up branding statement is: “Positioned to draw on record of achievement and success while delivering exceptional sales results that maximize unequivocal selling strengths.”

If you are networking or prospecting employers/recruiters and are not sure what specific openings exist, use a headline that describes the type of job you seek as specifically as possible. Networking or prospecting but open to more than one kind of job? Have a resume with a headline for each type of job you’re considering and use each resume version with its appropriate audience.

Resume Branding Statement: This statement defines who you are, your promise of value, and why you should be sought out. A branding statement is a punchy “ad-like” statement that tells immediately what you can bring to an employer. Your branding statement should sum up your value proposition, encapsulate your reputation, showcase what sets you apart from others, and describe the added value you bring to a situation. Think of it as a sales pitch.

Consider integrating these elements into the brief synopsis that is your branding statement:

• What makes you different? • What qualities or characteristics make you distinctive? • What have you accomplished? • What is your most noteworthy personal trait? • What benefits (problems solved) do you offer?

Don’t be afraid to use the targeted employer’s name in your branding statement, for example: “Eager to lead innovative strategic marketing initiatives that aggressively increase SolarBright’s market share, sustain growth, and maximize profitability.”

The headline and branding statement are often used in combination, as shown in some of the examples below:

A Few Sample Resume Branding Statements with and Without Headlines

VICE PRESIDENT, OPERATIONS Specialize in raising the bar, creating strategy, managing risk, and improving the quality and caliber of operations. Poised to apply strong leadership, entrepreneurial, and business-development background as a successful MBA student. TOP-PRODUCING SALES PROFESSIONAL Positioned to draw on record of achievement and success to deliver exceptional sales results that maximize unequivocal strengths as outstanding, top-producing sales professional. RECEPTIONIST Poised to contribute strong interpersonal, communications, and organizational skills and experience to your organization in a front-line, customer-support role.

You can also see some samples that show how headlines and branding statements appear on formatted resumes here.

“Objectiveless” Resume Objective: If you already have a well-written objective statement, it’s not hard to convert it to a Resume Focal Point that employers won’t – pardon the pun – “object” to. First, remove the word “Objective.” Then change the typical objective language; eliminate the infinitive phrase – “To play key role ...”, “To contribute ...”, “To lead ...”, “To maximize ...”, “To add value ...” – that objectives often start with. Here are two examples of objectives converted to “objectiveless” objectives:

Objective: To bring out-of-the-box vision to a fast-track position on a creative advertising team with particular interest in copywriting. Revised Resume Focal Point: Bringing out-of-the-box vision to a fast-track position on a creative advertising team with particular interest in copywriting. Objective: To improve company profits by contributing bilingual skills and knowledge of civil-law countries in the legal department of a firm that engages in business in Latin America.

Revised Resume Focal Point: Committed to improving company profits by contributing bilingual skills and knowledge of civil-law countries in the legal department of a firm that engages in business in Latin America.

http://www.quintcareers.com/resume_branding_statements.html

You will notice that an “objectiveless” objective is very much like a branding statement.

Using a “Summary of Qualifications” or “Professional Profile” Section: To sharpen your focus, consider a section such as a “Summary of Qualifications,” “Profile,” or the (other names for such a section include Career Summary, Summary, Executive Summary, Professional Profile, Strengths, Skills, Key Skills, Skills Summary, Summary of Qualifications, Background Summary, Professional Summary, Highlights of Qualifications). Such a section, in a reader-friendly bulleted format, can contribute to powerful resume opener that draws the reader in; it can be part of the top third of resume that showcases your best selling points, catches the prospective employer’s attention, and immediately demonstrates your value as a candidate.

Even these sections have fallen a bit out of favor with employers in recent years, with many saying they don’t read them. We still recommend them because they are a good way to front-load your resume with keywords and specificity. Choose 3-4 of your top selling points and craft them into bullets for your Profile section. Also ensure that your bullets are not unsubstantiated fluff. You must substantiate any skills or qualifications you tout in this section by giving examples, ideally including metrics or evidence of how you demonstrated each qualification. These points should also match directly to the job requirements from a job posting.

Use our Resume Professional Profile/Qualifications Summary Worksheet for assistance in creating this section. You can see examples of Profile sections in most of these resume samples.

Focusing the Rest of Your Resume: While the top third of your resume’s first page is the most important spot for its Resume Focal Point, you can sharpen the focus of the balance of your resume in various ways.

Spotlight your best selling points up front. “The Resume Ingredients Rule,” set forth by Donald Asher, author of numerous resume books, notes that information on a resume should be listed in order of importance to the reader. Thus, you can strategically organize your resume to position you for the job you seek. See Blunder No. 29 for more.

Remember that a resume is a marketing document that should highlight the aspects of your experience that best sell you for a particular position. You may also consider placing other sections of your resume before your Experience section to showcase your best selling points. For example, do you have a newly minted MBA degree that adds value to your candidacy?

Consider whether your education or your experience is your best selling point and which should therefore be listed first. Generally, brand-new graduates list education first, while job-seekers with a few years of experience list experience first.

http://www.quintcareers.com/profile_summary_worksheet.pdf

http://www.quintcareers.com/resume_samples.html

You may want to re-prioritize the bullet points you present under each job, giving greater emphasis to an accomplishment that will be meaningful to the employer you’re targeting. You’ve undoubtedly held jobs that encompassed a broad scope, many accountabilities, and numerous achievements. Fine-tune these to a razor-sharp list of those that are most relevant to the job you seek next. Eliminate any bullet point that fails to support what you seek to do next.

The best way to ensure a Resume Focal Point and a sharp focus throughout your resume is to ask yourself at every point in your resume preparation:

• What does the targeted employer most want to see? • What information can I quickly convey that will show the employer how well I fit

this job (or this type of job, or this industry)? • What content should jump out at an employer spending just 6 seconds looking at

my resume?

4. Blunder: Resume is too general.


To keep from limiting themselves, candidates sometimes create a very broad resume that lacks specific information. A peeve for Melissa Holmes, senior technical recruiter, at Levi, Ray & Shoup Consulting Services, Springfield, IL, is “failure to include enough information for a recruiter to determine fit. Candidates should be aware of the importance of effective communication, and yet they seem less motivated to tailor their resume to the specific job in which they are seeking.” Consider using our Cover Letter and Resume Customization Worksheet.

5. Blunder: Resume fails to address critical requirements. Blunder applies equally to print and electronic resumes.

While many requirements contained in job postings comprise “wish lists” describing the ideal candidate, some are true deal-breakers if the candidate doesn’t possess them. Examples include fluency in a foreign language, required credentials and certifications, eligibility to work in a given country of which the applicant is not a citizen, willingness to travel, and willingness to relocate.

Identify the requirements in a job posting that appear to be ironclad, and be sure to list on your resume how you meet them. Your Summary/Profile Profile section is a good place to call attention to these critical qualifications.

http://www.quintcareers.com/customization_worksheet.pdf

Chapter 2: Flawed Content 6. Blunder: Resume is duties-driven rather than accomplishments-driven.


Many – if not most – resumes are duties-driven when they instead should be accomplishments-driven. Job-seekers should, for example, NEVER use expressions like “Duties included,” “Responsibilities included,” or “Responsible for.” That’s job-description language, not accomplishments-oriented resume language that sells. After all, if you were an employer and wanted to run a successful organization, would you be looking for candidates who can perform only their basic job functions, or would you want employees who can make real contributions? In these days in which most resumes are placed into keyword-searchable databases, you won’t find employers searching resumes for words like “responsibilities,” “duties,” or “responsible for.”

The subject of accomplishments in job-search communications is a book unto itself. Literally. Accomplishments are such an important component in job-search communication that I wrote the book You Are More Accomplished Than You Think: How to Brainstorm Your Achievements for Career and Life Success. I recommend that book for helping you brainstorm and identify your accomplishments.

Your resume must – with a future-oriented flavor – emphasize results, outcomes, and career-defining performance indicators. Using numbers, context, and meaningful metrics, the resume must paint a picture of you in action – meeting needs/challenges, solving problems, impacting the company’s big picture, growing the business, enhancing revenue, and driving profits. If you can achieve the important step of identifying your accomplishments, the rest will fall into place.

“The most important thing any job-seeker should do before attempting to write a resume,” advises my partner Randall Hansen, “is to first sit down and make a list of your skills and accomplishments from all your previous experiences (work, volunteer, school, etc.) because you will take from this list those critical skills and accomplishments that highlight your fit for the next job you are seeking.”

Accomplishments vs. duties/Responsibilities: This advice from resume writer JoAnn Nix is what got me started on my crusade to encourage job-seekers to emphasize accomplishments on resumes:

“A resume should be accomplishment-oriented, not responsibility-driven. The biggest mistake that I see in the resumes people send me is that they list responsibilities. That doesn’t grab anybody’s attention. People aren’t interested in your responsibilities. They already know the general responsibilities of a position, so they don’t want to know what you do from day to day. They want to know that you’re a mover and a shaker: How you contribute to the organization, how you

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=B00AG2EYXQ/dynamiccoverlettA/

show initiative, that you can be a key player. That’s what they want to see. “For example, if you’re a sales and marketing manager, you could say: ‘Joined organization to spearhead sales and marketing initiative for newly developed territory. Led the aggressive turnaround of a poorly performing district and propelled sales from one to six million in 14 months.’ That’s the type of accomplishment they want to see.”

Accomplishments are the points that increase reader’s interest, stimulate a request for a job interview, and help sell you to an employer – much more so than everyday job duties. Research suggests that content elements that propel employers to immediately discard resumes include a focus on duties instead of accomplishments, while documented achievements were highly ranked among content elements that employers look for. Be sure also that the accomplishments you list support your career goals.

Hiring decision-makers want to see the results you attained for past employers, what you accomplished, the value you added, and how you made a difference in your past jobs. They want to gain a sense of the complexity and significance of what you’ve done. Some recruiters recommend a bulleted list of key projects indicating accomplishments and results.

I want to hammer home this point – and have enlisted the opinions of several career experts and hiring decision-makers to help me do so – because I have for so long seen resumes whose authors did not understand that resumes cannot be what recruiting expert Dr. John Sullivan calls “merely summaries of their previous job responsibilities.” Sullivan and I aren’t the only ones. “The vast majority of resumes I see read like a series of job descriptions,” writes Alison Green in “21 Things Hiring Managers Wish You Knew.” Sullivan notes that “this format will cause them to omit information on key assessment factors like skills, tools, and accomplishments.” They will also omit the answer to the question Green poses: What did you accomplish in this job that someone else wouldn’t have?”

Entrepreneur and speaker Tory Johnson concurs: “The biggest mistake is a resume that rehashes responsibilities instead of celebrating accomplishments. I don’t just want to know what you did, but, more importantly, how well you did it. The reader should understand in a heartbeat where you excel and what you do best.”

Why do job-seekers make this mistake? Whether out of sheer laziness or the kind of paralysis that sets in when an individual is faced with writing a resume, they take the job description they were given when they were first hired and copy and paste it into their resume. This information on your resume does absolutely nothing to distinguish you. “The reality is that people in similar jobs perform similar job tasks,” notes resume writer Barbara Safani. “An accountant in company A may not have job tasks that are that different from the accountant in company B,” Safani notes, “yet, the value that each brings to their organization may be totally unique. Minimize content about job tasks and focus on more compelling accomplishments.”

Most employers do not need to know about your past duties and responsibilities. “When an organization has a vacancy,” notes resume writer Sharon Graham, “the hiring decision maker is well aware of the responsibilities of the position. To feature the career successes of the candidate, resumes need to focus on achievements instead of job duties,” Graham writes in “Research Study: How Does Your Resume Compare?”

Describing your job responsibilities is tantamount to reciting a job description, which in turn suggests to the prospective employer that you did the bare minimum in the job. As Patrick Erwin writes in a comment to a blog post, “When someone very dryly lists responsibilities and duties, it comes off as ‘I had a gun pointed to my head making me do this every day.’ It’s much better to put it in the context of, “I made this happen.” How did you take initiative in the job? What did you do on the job that was different or better than anyone else holding that job? It’s not always easy to describe the value you added for your former employers, but doing so is a lot more effective than listing responsibilities and duties.

Duties and responsibilities are also dull and lifeless. “When I see ‘duties included’ or ‘responsible for’ on a resume, I know that what follows is going to be boring and obvious,” writes author Donald Asher. “Focus on accomplishments, not duties,” Asher echoes. “What did you do that was important? What did you accomplish or contribute? What did you learn on the job or in special training? What did you create that was above and beyond the scope of the job that was handed to you. That’s what sells.”

OK, so I’ve driven home the point that you need to emphasize accomplishments on your resume and not duties and responsibilities. It’s not enough, however, to simply list accomplishments on your resume; you must demonstrate that you’ve researched that organization and can tie your accomplishments to the employer’s needs – showing the future employer what you can do rather than simply what you did. “A good resume will show what you know, what you did, and how those things translate into value to the organization,” says David Topus. “You have to show the outcome, how you made a difference.”

To show outcomes and results, focus on accomplishments that set you apart from other job candidates. In each job, what special things did you do to set yourself apart? How did you do the job better than anyone else or than anyone else could have done? What did you do to make it your own? What special things did you do to impress your boss so that you might be promoted? What were the problems or challenges that you or the organization faced? What did you do to overcome the problems? What were the results of your efforts? How did the organization benefit from your performance? How did you leave your employers better off than before you worked for them? How have you helped your employer to:

• make money • save money • save time • make work easier and more efficient • solve a specific problem

• be more competitive • build relationships • expand the business • attract new customers • retain existing customers

How do you show employers what you can do? “It’s what we in the field call prioritizing statements, or targeting your resume to each company to which you apply,” writes Bob McIntosh in his article, “Write a resume recruiters and employers will want to read; not one they dread.” In other words, illustrate how your qualifications and accomplishments match the employers’ requirements in order of importance.”

What are some techniques to ensure you are prioritizing accomplishments on your resume in a way that tailors the document to each specific employer and that employer’s needs? One way is through scrutinizing the job posting to which you’re responding. In “How to Decode a Job Posting,” Jerome Young of AttractJobsNow.com advises focusing on the responsibilities section of a job posting: “The responsibilities section,” he writes, “describes what will be expected of the employee in the position. You’ll often find that there are five to 10 bullet points in this section, but in our research with recruiters and hiring managers we’ve found that the first three responsibilities are the most important. Job postings are usually based on a primary business need, to which additional responsibilities are added to create a full-time position. Your resume should focus on your experience, results and accomplishments in the tasks outlined in the first three bullets in the responsibilities section. Also you’ll find keywords in those first three bullets that recruiters will use in searching for qualified candidates.” If you’re working with a recruiter, ask him or her to help you identify the accomplishments most relevant to the needs of his or her client company.

As we’ve already noted, you probably can’t have just one resume anymore. “If you have multiple potential targets for your job search,” advises resume writer Karen Siwak, “you may need to create completely different resumes, highlighting the accomplishments that are most relevant for each target.” For each resume, you may want to re-prioritize the bullet points you present under your jobs, giving greater emphasis to an accomplishment that will be meaningful to the employer you’re targeting. You’ve undoubtedly held jobs that encompassed a broad scope, many accountabilities, and numerous achievements. Fine-tune these to a razor-sharp list of those that are most relevant to the job you seek next. Eliminate any accomplishment that fails to support what you seek to do next.

As I noted at the top of this chapter, comprehensive research on targeted employers will aid you in this tailoring quest. “Before you sit down to write, get really clear on who your target audience is and what their challenges, goals, and pain points are,” Siwak advises. “Try to understand their buying motivators, the criteria that they will use to find the right candidate. Clearly define your value proposition, and back it up by evidence from your training and career accomplishments.”

7. Blunder: Resume content lacks measurable results.


While accomplishments on a resume are far preferable to duties and responsibilities, “mere” accomplishments aren’t always enough to feed employers’ hunger for achievements. As many achievements as possible should be measurable, especially quantifiable. Use metrics or results for at least 40 percent of your bullet points for each job. Quantifying your accomplishment gives them more credibility. Among measurable items employers want to see are sales volume (and ranking in comparison with peer and compared to previous periods, percent of quota), number (and titles) of direct reports, number of people you’ve hired, size of teams you’ve led, your position within the team, amount of money you’ve saved, success in completing projects, initiatives that result in revenue-generation, process-improvement, and cost-containment. 8. Blunder: Resume is so full of quantitative data that it’s hard to read.


While employers have a strong desire to see your accomplishments quantified, Excessive use of numbers can hurt your resume’s readability, so don’t go overboard. Well-chosen words and well-crafted phrases will also get your message across.

9. Blunder: Resume fails to showcase targeted skills.


Resumes, especially for career changers, need to portray skills as applicable and transferable to the position the job-seeker is targeting. You need to show the employer that the skills you’ve polished will contribute to the bottom line, even if you seek a job different from what you’ve done in the past.

What are transferable skills? Simply put, they are skills you have acquired during any activity in your life — jobs, classes, projects, parenting, hobbies, sports, virtually anything — that are transferable and applicable to what you want to do in your next job.

Always portray your skills in your resume as applicable to the job you seek. If you have good experience and you’re seeking in a job in the same field you’ve pursued in the past, portraying your skills as transferable is relatively easy. But if you are changing careers and seeking to do something entirely different from what you’ve done in the past, or you are a college student or other entry-level jobseeker without much experience, you have a much more difficult task ahead of you.

While no single element is necessarily more important than the others, skills deserve significant attention because skills portrayal comprises a large portion of the job-seeker’s marketing campaign, especially in the resume and cover letter.

Employers generally seek candidates with a certain set of skills very specific to a given job. These types of skills, often referred to as “hard skills,” frequently are required in technical jobs; for example, in this job posting for a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Developer/Analyst:

• Knowledge of one or more GIS packages and GIS programming languages. • May be specialist in a technical area such a photogrammetry, remote sensing/

image processing, GPS or in applications such as cadastral, AM/FM or environmental.

• Aware of web-authoring development tools. • Knowledge of operating systems (UNIX or NT) knowledge of relational database

theory and application. • Experience in implementing GIS Standards.

Beyond hard skills, another set of skills, known as “soft skills,” is extremely important because employers seek candidates with various subsets of these skills in nearly every job. Because these soft skills are applicable to so many jobs and because they are portable as you leave one job and seek out another, they are often called “transferable” skills.

Know your skills. While this guideline sounds like a statement of the obvious, I was constantly amazed at the number of clients of my former resume-writing service who could not identify their own skills. Many cannot describe their skills without looking at a master list. Others identify skills that have little to do with the type of job they seek while overlooking skills that are crucial to their desired job. In my experience, it’s better for job-seekers to work through a process or assessment to identify their skills than it is to simply review a list of skills and pick out the ones you feel you possess. By asking yourself a number of probing questions, you can assess your skills more honestly and accurately than by choosing them from a list. Here are some ways to identify your skills:

Use our Transferable Skills Worksheet.

On her “Damn Good” Web site, the late Yana Parker listed exercises for all types of job-seekers to use to uncover their skills:

• Adult Job Hunters in Career Transition: http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-transition.html

• High School Students and Young Adults: http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-students.html

• Adults Just Entering the Workforce (minimal or no paid experience): http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-adults.html

• College Students and Recent Grads: http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-college.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/transferable_skills_worksheet.pdf

http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-transition.html

http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-students.html

http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-adults.html

http://www.damngood.com/jobseekers/skills-college.html

Know the skills that employers most look for. The best way to learn what skills employers in your field look for is to scrutinize job postings of the employers and jobs that interest you. If you review a lot of ads and job postings, you’ll soon realize that nearly all employers look for certain skills. Various experts have produced lists of these commonly sought skills, and all differ slightly, but you’d probably find general agreement about the following Big Five:

• Communication skills • Interpersonal skills • Teamwork skills • Leadership skills • Computer/Information technology skills

Among the first three, of course, several combinations are possible, such as interpersonal communication skills, interpersonal/teamwork skills, and so forth.

A second tier of most-in-demand skills might look something like this: • Adaptability/flexibility skills • Problem-solving skills • Organizational skills • Analytical skills • Quantitative skills

Know how to describe and portray your skills in your resume so that employers will know you have the right stuff.

Let’s first look at the career-changer’s dilemma first. I was once asked to create a resume makeover for a woman who wanted to become an account representative (sales, in other words). I won’t tell you what field she sought to change from; see if you can guess it from this entry on her old resume about her current job:

• Utilize personal computer for word processing, spreadsheets, and graphic design including internal/external correspondence, reports, procedure manuals and presentations.

• Create and distribute a variety of queries and reports using Access. • Process confidential employee records such as salary changes, vacation/

absenteeism reports and performance appraisals, etc. • Complete and submit invoices to process for payments. • Schedule meetings/appointments and make travel arrangements. • Accountable for reconciliation of expense reports. • Develop and maintain product application guides using flowcharts.

Did you guess secretary? You’re right. Her resume screams “secretary,” not account representative.

I told her that if she really wanted an account rep position, she was emphasizing the wrong skills. She should not have been emphasizing clerical and secretarial skills — or

even computer skills. None of those skills is even mentioned in the ads she sent me typifying the kind of job she wanted.

I told her she should be emphasizing sales, customer service, interpersonal, and communications skills. Almost nothing in her current job — the way she portrayed it on her old resume — supported her desire to be an account rep. Yet, I’m sure her job requires great interpersonal skills, and she interacts with lots of diverse people and solve the problems of her boss and others. Those are the kinds of skills needed in account-rep jobs.

For example, I told her that instead of saying “Schedule meetings/appointments and make travel arrangements,” she should say “Interact with a wide variety of personalities to schedule meetings and make travel arrangements.”

That’s what you need to do if you’re seeking a new job. Think of everything you’ve done in terms of how it is transferable to what you want to be doing and portray it that way.

For every item on your resume, think: How can I portray this skill so that it supports the idea of doing what I want to do in my next job? If you can’t make it support what you want to do, leave it out.

The classic examples I show my students about how a college student can portray transferable skills come from Donald Asher’s book, From College to Career, one of the best resumes books available for college students.

Look at how Asher takes a typical lowly job held by a college student, that of receptionist, and portrays it as applicable to her desire to work in finance:

• Proved ability to deal with a wide range of individuals, including high-net-worth investors and institutional money manager, in a stressful and time-sensitive environment.

• Gained knowledge of financial markets and instruments, especially stocks, bonds, futures, and options.

Now, see how he makes a waitress seem like just the person you’d want to hire in an entry-level marketing job by portraying her skills as transferable:

• Act as a “sales representative” for the restaurant, selling add-ons and extras to achieve one of the highest per-ticket and per-night sales averages.

• Prioritize and juggle dozens of simultaneous responsibilities. • Built loyal clientele of regulars in addition to tourist trade. • Use computer daily.

For a discussion of how to portray transferable skills in a cover letter, read an excerpt on the subject from my book, Dynamic Cover Letters for New Graduates.

http://www.quintcareers.com/cover_letter_transferable_skills.html

To know what skills to emphasize, you will probably have to do some research on the company at which you seek employment and the particular job you’re applying for. If you’re responding to an ad, it’s easy to find clues right in the ad to the most important skills. You can also scarcely go wrong by emphasizing the skills that virtually all employers are looking for, such as teamwork, communications, interpersonal, and leadership skills. Follow this link to see a detailed list of transferable skills.

10. Blunder: Resume contains spelling errors, typos, and grammatical flaws.


Hiring decision-makers cite this peeve more than any other. Consider the common error of spelling “manager” as “manger.” You’ll note that this misspelling won’t be picked up by spell-check functions because “manger” is a correctly spelled word. So is “posses,” the plural of “posse,” which I often see on resumes when the job-seeker intends “possess.” “I once received a resume where the applicant misspelled the name of the university from which he received his MBA,” said Jeff Weaver, regional manager for a global information services company. “Poor spelling and grammar ... is particularly worrying,” said Pete Follows, senior consultant, for SaccoMann, Leeds, UK. “If a candidate is not giving due care and attention to a document to improve their own personal circumstances, what care would they take with documents with less personal significance?” A few tips on avoiding typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors:

• Use spell-check functions but remember that they aren’t enough. • Proofread. Then put the resume down overnight and proof it again in the

morning with fresh eyes. • Try proofing from the bottom up. Reading your resume in a different order will

enable you to catch errors that you may have glossed over before because your brain was accustomed to reading your verbiage in the expected order.

• Ask a friend or family member to proof, preferably one who is a meticulous speller and grammarian.

• Be careful about company and software names, which are frequently misspelled and can damage your credibility.

• Consider hiring a professional resume writer.

11. Blunder: Resume is too wordy, contains too much information.


Strike a balance between a meaty, content-rich resume and a concise, readable document. Employers want both. Limit bullet points while still telling your full story. Cut out unnecessary words. If you’ve sliced out as much as you can and the resume still

http://www.quintcareers.com/transferable_skills_set.html

looks text-dense, look for ways to break up blocks of content. “Long sentences with deep paragraphs put me to sleep, and I have a good chance of missing something important because I don’t have time to read a novel,” said Brian Howell, CSAM, of The QWorks Group.

12. Blunder: Resume is written in third-person.


Respondents to a survey I used to research resume blunders were surprisingly vocal in their irritation over this resume affectation. Although the pronoun “I” is generally not used in resume, it is the understood – but unwritten – subject of a resume’s bullet points. Note that “I” is the unwritten subject of this bullet point:

[I] Facilitate restriction-removal processes on restricted/private placement securities. When the bullet point, however, is written with a third-person verb, as in the following, the subject becomes “he” or “she:” [He] or [She] Facilitates restriction-removal processes on restricted/private placement securities.

Some job-seekers are even more blatant in their use of third person, annoying employers with summary statements such as:

George Jones is a globally experienced broker and trader with significant, progressive brokerage experience and expertise.

As an Information Resources Management manager (IRM) at both the corporate and project level, Bob Smith has consistently demonstrated his ability to understand customer needs and develop and implement effective IRM solutions for both commercial and government contracts.

13. Blunder: Resume does not list phone number, only an e-mail address,

or has inappropriate e-mail address.


In the age of electronic submission, many candidates seem to think decision-makers will want to communicate by e-mail only, but a phone number on your resume is an absolute must. Be sure to include a daytime phone number as that’s when recruiters are most likely to call you. The recruiting process often moves too rapidly for e-mail; recruiters prefer to call – and expect you either to answer or call back without delay. Without a phone number, “I can’t call you,” said recruiter Alice Hanson, “and most jobs I have on my desk need to be filled in 24-48 hours. I find a good candidate and can’t connect – it drives me wild.” If employers can’t reach you very quickly, they’ll move on to the next person. They still want to see e-mail addresses listed as an alternate contact method, however, and recruiters note a surprising number of candidates who fail to provide sufficient contact information.

Your e-mail address must be professional. “I don’t want to know if you are ‘sokkerguy’ or ‘kittylover,’” says Joe Briand, partner at The Clarion Group, Placerville, CA. “Use Yahoo or Gmail and get a professional-sounding address for your job search.”

An email address and phone number are critical, but a mailing/physical address no longer is. Increasing numbers of job-seekers are omitting address out of concern about identity theft and being disqualified for living too far away. (Employers are concerned about hiring candidates who need to relocate – or even those who would have a long commute to work.) 14. Blunder: Resume contains the personal pronoun “I.”


It might seem like a silly protocol to omit “I” when the understood subject of resume bullet points is, in fact, “I.” But eliminating personal pronouns (I, me, my) is simply an accepted style, and not following that style, Hanson noted, makes the candidate seem “amateurish.” 15. Blunder: Resume contains inexplicable acronyms and industry-specific

jargon.

Blunder especially applies to print resumes but is less important in electronic resumes. In fact, acronyms and jargon may be sought in resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems.

Here’s an example of a head-spinning array of acronyms and jargon from one resume reviewed for my book, Top Notch Executive Resumes. The reader can figure out many of them, but it would so much easier if they were spelled out;

• Manage the Asia Pacific WCS IT Outsourcing Transition & Transformation Programme Waves 1& 2. This is part of the Global Transition & Transformation Programme, a cluster of 82 major projects over a period of 3 years for an APAC budget of 8.7M Euros, executed by EDS but controlled and monitored by ABN.

• Transitioned to EDS ~300 Technology staff in Singapore, H Kong , Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai including the ABN Regional Processing Centre on time and within budget.

• Negotiated Wave 2 T&T budget cost avoidance of 0.5m Euros. • Provide direct management support to the A/P Technology CIO & Management

Team, encompassing Financial Control Process Co-ordination, Resource Management, Portfolio & Project Control Project (A/P 320 projects with a budget expenditure of ~34M Euros). Responsible for the functional & organizational development of the Global Retained Technology Organization (NTO) and the development of the Global Governance Framework schedule (part of the Global Service Agreement contract).

• Established & Implemented the Value Management Plan to achieve best practices within WCS Technology.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1564149897/dynamiccoverlettA/

• Developed the Global Retained Organization & Functional model on time & within budget.

• Managed the TOI - WCS (Investment & Commercial Banking) Global IT Operations and Global Change Control Teams.

• Provided Global Infrastructure Operational Services, defined/set Global Standards and Global IT Processing Services Strategy. This encompassed managing the Global IT Ops/Change Control Teams of > 300 staff and relevant expenditure budgets of >100M Euros.

• Restructured Global Lotus Notes Ops Team - FTE Savings by 70% and London Change Control Team-FTE Savings by 35%.

• Implemented Automation and AS/400 LPAR technologies to reduce RPC Singapore & Amsterdam Operational Costs by 25%.

• Negotiated a new TCO with IBM in Singapore with a cost savings of over 2.3M Sing. Dollars.

• Expanded Singapore RPC Processing Services Capabilities to establish a Centre of excellence.

• Established ISAP Global Change Control TAT Acceptance Criteria Policy & Standards.

• Established Global IT Processing Services Strategy / Business Model. • Developed the WCS Global SLOs and Major Contributor of the first TOI Service

Catalogue “Acronyms that are company-specific need to be reworked into a generic description of the same type that is easily understandable to those outside of that environment,” advised Melissa Holmes, senior technical recruiter.

With acronyms and jargon, ask yourself if every reader of your resume will understand what they mean.

With a print resume, the aim is to reduce use of these terms because they make the resume look cluttered and may not be understood. With a resume submitted online, however, these terms may be the very keywords the ATS has been set up to identify. 16. Blunder: Resume language is replete with “fluff,” flowery words, and

“resume speak” instead of specifics.


Your resume “needs to have good factual information and be clear as to what it is that you actually do; it doesn’t need to be fluffy and overwrought,” said survey respondent Thomas Burrell. Meg Steele, director of recruitment and employment mobility at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, decried the lack of specifics in resume language: “The most irritating characteristic on resumes is an overuse of flowery language without substantiation,” she said. “I want to see actual accomplishments, not summary statements that imply an understanding of functional areas that reported up to the individual. A good leader knows enough about what his or her people are doing to speak

intelligently about the problem that was being solved by this or that initiative. So, if [candidates] say ‘oversaw development of strategic solutions,’ they should have some more specific examples of said ‘strategic solutions’ and what the impact was to the business [and] the employees.” Agreed survey respondent Alison: “Weed out the garbage, and tell me what you made, saved, achieved, and make it quantifiable. Characterized as “resume speak” by survey respondents were words like “visionary,” “thought leader,” “evangelist,” “innovative,” “motivating,” and “engaging.” 17. Blunder: Resume language is egotistical and self-congratulatory.


Harlynn Goolsby of the Human Resources Department at OSRAM Sylvania compares this type of resume verbiage to a “bio or the introduction for a guest speaker.” Some examples of puffed-up phrases include “inspirational leader,” “as quoted in...,” and “winner of countless awards.”

18. Blunder: Content focuses on soft skills at the expense of hard data.


If you think this blunder contradicts No. 9, remember that No. 9 focuses on targeted skills. You want to spotlight the skills the employer seeks. Yes, you will often see soft skills mentioned in a job posting, but do realize that seeing soft skills listed on a resume is a low priority for many hiring decision-makers, who prefer to explore soft skills in the interview stage (and by talking to your references). Why? Because it is difficult to substantiate them on paper. “If you have to tell me you have these skills, you probably don’t have them,” said Kristina Creed, a senior manager at a for-profit education provider. Limit use of soft skills – such as communication, teamwork, and leadership – to those that are germane to the position you’re targeting. Portrayal of soft skills will be more credible if you substantiate them with solid examples of how you’ve demonstrated them. If hard skills are required, be sure to include them, too, and be very specific about them – types of projects, technical skills, and expertise. Soft skills are also helpful if you are in a profession in which hard skills predominate, and soft skills are unexpected but desirable. “If you’re a software engineering manager who has a real talent with people and is technically excellent – highlight it,” suggested Veronica Richmond, a human-resources in professional Oakville, Ontario, Canada. “You’re a rarity, so have great stories ready to back it up.” 19. Blunder: Span of work experience in a given job is listed with years

only instead of with months and years or is listed inconsistently from job to job.


Decision-makers want to see specific dates of employment – months and years (but not days). “A job that ran December, 2004, to January, 2005, if months are not listed, looks precisely the same as a job that ran January, 2004, to December, 2005 – a significant difference,” noted John Kennedy. Similarly, De Benedittis noted, “if your resume says 2004-2005, that could be a 30-day job or a 12-month job. I don’t want to guess and neither does my client. Put a month and a year on your resume, even if it is short term; we won’t be fooled because we will ask you the exact dates, and we will verify the information.” 20. Blunder: Not enough description of the scope of a given job is provided

beyond the job’s title.


Some candidates assume their title will tell the full story, but titles often have different meanings from organization to organization. You must convey a sense of what the scope of each position encompassed – yet not focus on duties/responsibilities. 21. Blunder: Jobs are omitted from the resume.


While this peeve is not universal, many decision-makers want to see the candidate’s entire job history from college graduation on. They suggest a bare-bones (position/title, employer, city/state, dates) listing of older jobs under a heading such as “Prior Experience” or “Previous Professional Experience.” Decision-makers expect you to account for all gaps between jobs. “Give it to me as straight as possible,” Seattle recruiter Alice Hanson said. “If you have been out of work for a year, put a bullet in that explains why. If you have multiple jobs that ended after three months, tell me you completed three three-month contract positions successfully.”

Most in hiring positions want to see when you graduated college and discount the age-discrimination argument because your graduation date will be discovered anyway when the recruiting firm is verifying information. “If a company is going to discriminate, truncating the resume may get you in a door, but won’t get the person the job,” Kennedy said. 22. Blunder: Disproportionate space or verbiage is devoted to older jobs.


Decision-makers expect to see the greatest proportion of content dedicated to your most recent and most relevant positions. They find it odd if you’ve devoted much more

attention to an older job than one that was more recent. “Unless it was an amazing accomplishment, I’m not concerned that you grew sales by 20 percent back in 1987,” said Brian Howell, CSAM, of The QWorks Group. 23. Blunder: The exact same verbiage is used to describe functions in

different jobs.


You may very well have had the same functions in multiple jobs, but you don’t add to the value of your resume if you express these functions the same way for each job. It’s not even necessary to list them for each job; once you’ve listed that function, the reader knows you have the experience. One job-seeker repeated the bullet point below for every job – changing only the number of staff supervised in each position:

Managed 32 subordinate staff from different Asian ethnic groups on recruitment, personnel, training issues.

24. Blunder: Resume fails to list educational credentials.


Candidates are sometimes advised to leave off an Education section if they have absolutely nothing to list there – but virtually everyone has at least some training under his or her belt. Some candidates might not realize that an Education section is expected, or they leave it off because they feel theirs is deficient. Education needs to be listed because employers want to see it. 25. Blunder: Resume contains personal information.


Mature job-seekers may remember a time when including personal information on a resume was standard practice. This information often included height, weight, birth date, social security number, marital status, children, and health status (as if anyone would admit on a resume to health that was less than excellent). Today’s hiring managers do not want to see this information because it raises discrimination issues. Doreen Perri-Gynn, associate vice president of human resources at Yang Ming (America) Corp., doesn’t want to know “if you have three children and your wife is a happy homemaker or your husband an accountant. This is extraneous information that may prevent a manager from hiring you because he/she wants to keep his benefits budget down.”

Since this type of information is still often included on resumes and CVs outside the U.S., Perri-Gynn advises Europeans when applying in the U.S. to “kindly leave off the picture, and family information. We do not require your children’s names, ages, schools,

wife’s maiden name and who her parents are. The U.S. bases hiring criteria on skills and accomplishments.” 26. Blunder: Resume contains long lists of awards, trainings, and similar

items.


These are the items that often add unnecessary length and wordiness to a resume. Here’s an opportunity to ask yourself the “so what?” question. For every item you are considering listing, ask if it truly adds any value to the resume. It’s not incumbent upon you to include everything you’ve ever accomplished, earned, or learned. Prioritize. Choose the items that will best make your case as the best qualified candidate for the job you seek. Consider also creating supplemental documents with awards, trainings, publications, presentations, media mentions, and similar items. That way, you’ll have them available if they’re requested, and you might also have an opportunity to discuss them in the interview stage.

27. Blunder: Resume contains lies or misleading statements or misrepresentations.


Despite high-profile individuals whose resume lies have been publicly reported, and despite the increasing use of background checks, lying remains rampant on resumes. A study conducted by J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc., revealed resume lies about past employment (the largest category), education, professional licensure and certifications, and military service. It’s just too risky to lie because you will probably get caught. Hiring decision-makers are far more attuned to falsehoods than before, and many employers are doing background checks. It doesn’t even take an official background check to uncover lies; a recent Executive Job Market Intelligence Report from ExecuNet pointed to more than a third of executives who have found problems, such as misstated academic qualifications and falsified company or title information, through simple online searches. Don’t be tempted to lie, stretch the truth, or misrepresent the facts. That weekend certificate program you completed at Harvard isn’t the same as a Harvard MBA. 28. Blunder: Facts stated in one part of the resume are not supported

elsewhere.


It’s not unusual to see a candidate make a statement in the sales-oriented top potion of the first page of a resume that is not backed up anywhere else in the resume, perhaps

claiming a skill or experience that is never mentioned again. The candidate may also state a certain number of years of experience in a field, but when the decision-maker reviews the experience section, the years don’t add up to the number claimed. Sometimes stated years of experience don’t provide a true picture of the candidate’s background. “Some people can state they have a lot of experience in a particular field, but if you look at length of time, they are jumping around every few months,” said a human-resources generalist from Fairfax County, VA. “They are not really gaining much experience in only a few months at a job.”

29. Blunder: Resume items are listed in an order that doesn’t consider the reader’s interest.


“The Resume Ingredients Rule,” set forth by Donald Asher, author of numerous resume books, says that information on a resume should be listed in order of importance to the reader. Therefore, in listing your jobs, what’s generally most important is your title/position. So list in this preferred order: Title/position, name of employer (sometimes these two items are switched as seen in the next paragraph), city/state of employer, dates of employment. I can’t tell you how many resumes I’ve seen that list dates first.

Dates can be important to some employers, but they’re generally not as important as what your position was and whom you worked for. Listing dates first is also a mistake for resumes placed in employers’ Applicant Tracking Systems (which comprises most resumes submitted electronically). “To ensure applicant tracking systems read and import your work experience properly, always start it with your employer’s name, followed by your title, followed by the dates you held that title,” advises Meridith Levinson in an article on CIO.com. Education follows the same principle; thus, the preferred order for listing your education is: Name of degree (spelled out: Bachelor of _________) in name of major, name of university, city/state of university, graduation year, followed by peripheral information, such as minor and GPA. If you haven’t graduated yet, list your information the same way. Since the graduation date you’ve listed is in the future, the employer will know you don’t have the degree yet. By the way, the Resume Ingredients Rule is also the reason that experience and education are listed in reverse chronological order on your resume; it’s assumed that your most recent education and experience are most important and relevant to the reader. Also consider whether your education or your experience is your best selling point and which should therefore be listed first. Generally, brand-new graduates list education first, while job-seekers with a few years of experience list experience first. When job-seekers add value to their education by attaining an MBA or other graduate degree, they

often switch education back to the more prominent position because it now becomes the hot selling point. In fields such as science and higher education, in which education remains a more important selling point than experience, education tends to be listed first consistently. In many countries outside the U.S., education is also considered more important than experience.

30. Blunder: Resume lacks links to social-media-profiles.


Many, if not most, employers these days expect candidates to be well-connected on social media, especially LinkedIn.

Social-media links aren’t yet universally expected on resumes, but they’re highly important in some professions. Employers want to know more about you, as well as gauge your transparency and visibility.

Obviously, if you include social-media links, your profiles need to be squeaky clean and professional. 31. Blunder: Resume contains non-parallel construction.


What in the world does the word “parallel” have to do with resumes?

Parallelism in resume writing – or any writing – refers to consistency in grammatical parts of speech. Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab defines parallelism this way: “Parallel structure means using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance.”

In resume writing, parallelism is important in at least two areas: • The bullet points in your Profile or Qualifications Summary section. • The bullet points describing what you’ve done in your jobs.

In a Profile or Qualifications Summary sections, the idea is to make the parallel, as though each bullet point is completing the same sentence, thus boosting readability. Imagine that each Summary/Profile bullet point I write finishes an unstated but understood sentence that begins: “I am a(n)...” as in:

• [I am a] Seasoned systems analyst with strong commitment to time and resource budgets, new-business development, strategic planning, innovation, technology trends, customer-service needs, and close collaboration with sales and marketing during development.

• [I am a] Competent problem-solver who resolved sales and shipping issues by creating internal customer-care system and saved 20 percent shipping;

researched and delivered Web conferencing service for sales that saved 30 percent of travel budgets.

• [I am an] Innovator who partnered with another programmer to create pioneering language-learning software that earned national attention; served as lead analyst for revolutionary legal document generating and tracking product.

• ... and so on

In the bullet points describing your job functions and accomplishments, don’t mix noun and verb phrases. Let’s look at this example:

• Managed and controlled all aspects of company’s West Coast presence. [verb] • Complete ownership of inventory and financial standards. [noun] • Full P&L responsibilities. [noun] • Analyzed market and forecast sales, prepared corporate budgets and monitored

results to achieve ROI objectives. [verb]

Instead, in the two bullet points above that use noun phrases, change to verbs: • Supervised inventory and financial standards. • Completely oversaw profit and loss aspects of operation.

Here, the bullet points are correctly parallel, all using simple present tense verbs:

• Solve problems and correct processes to ensure quality service, satisfy customer needs, and assure that company’s interests and resources were efficiently utilized.

• Frequently deliver solutions to urgent, complicated issues thought to be impossible to resolve and earn the gratitude of dealers, sales field reps, and business partners.

• Provide excellent customer service, offering quality products and exceptional assistance for dealers; respond quickly to customer needs and requests.

• Fine-tune processes and initiate clearer information sharing through new forms and communication tools.

• Improve communication and processes with shipping carriers; suggest warehouse process improvement to eliminate shipping errors; assist in analyzing product need and frequency to forecast warehouse stock and ensure its adequacy for demand while reducing inventory without compromising availability.

• Aid in developing and implementing dealer Web site that decreased incoming call volume because dealers can now place their orders online.

In general, use simple present-tense verbs for a current job you still hold and past-tense verbs for past jobs. It gets a bit tricky when you are describing a current job, but you need to highlight a past accomplishment in that job. For example, the current job of the job-seeker above included a one-time accomplishment, as opposed to an ongoing aspect of her job:

• Reduced shipping costs caused by errors in updating dealer database.

Here, there is little choice but to use past tense for this past accomplishment. The parallelism is hampered, but these past accomplishments can be grouped together at the beginning or end of the bulleted list of job functions and accomplishments so the transition from present to past is less jarring to the reader.

32. Blunder: References are listed directly on your resume.


Never list specific references directly on your resume. List them on a separate sheet, and even then, submit them only when specifically requested by an employer. See our Free Sample Job Reference Lists for Job-Seekers. Even the phrase, “References: Available upon request,” is seen as outdated because it is a given that you will provide references upon request. If you couldn’t, you would have no business looking for a job.

33. Blunder: Resume contains content that should never be listed on a resume.


As noted in Blunder No. 25, don’t ever list height, weight, age, date of birth, place of birth, marital status, sex, race, health, social-security number (except on an International Resume/CV)

Also don’t include: • Reasons for leaving previous job(s) • Name of boss or supervisor • Street addresses and phone numbers of past employers (city and state is

sufficient) • Photo of yourself • Salary information • Specific names of references (more on this issue later) • The title “Resume” • Religion, church affiliations, political or other controversial affiliations: Any

disclosure on your resume that could get you screened out as a candidate is risky. You may take the stance that you don’t want to work for an employer that would eliminate you because a hiring manager didn’t like your political beliefs or religious affiliation. But given that, for most candidates, religion, politics, and any other controversial affiliations are not relevant to your next job, it’s wise to leave them out.

34. Blunder: Resume contains negative information.


http://www.quintcareers.com/sample_reference_lists.html

Since a resume is primarily a marketing document, it should be a no-brainer that it should not include negative information; yet this blunder does pop up from time to time. The most common inclusion of negative information is that the candidate was terminated from a previous job. Neither termination nor any other kind of information about why you left a job should appear on your resume.

Another piece of negative information that doesn’t need to be on your resume is failed entrepreneurial experience.

35. Blunder: Resume verbs are weak.


Strong action verbs are the linchpin of robust resumes.

But some verbs just don’t pack the punch that others do. Examples:

Weak: Involved in identifying pertinent documents for depositions in complex antitrust litigation. Why it’s weak: It doesn’t show any effort or accomplishment to be involved in an activity. Better: Participated in identifying pertinent documents for depositions in complex antitrust litigation. Even better: Contributed to identifying pertinent documents for depositions in complex antitrust litigation. OR: Identified pertinent documents for depositions in complex antitrust litigation. (Does it really matter that you weren’t the only one doing the identifying?) OR: Played key role in identifying pertinent documents for depositions in complex antitrust litigation.

Weak: Worked with minimal supervision. Why it’s weak: “Work” is too generalized. Everyone works. It’s better to be specific. Better: Performed with minimal supervision. Even better: Excelled with minimal supervision.

Frequently when job-seekers use “work” in resumes and cover letters, they mean it in the sense of working with others. In that case, “interact” or “collaborate” are better word choices: Weak: Work with technical advisers, project managers, and operations staff as part of a team to support large infrastructure of labor-management hardware and software. Better: Collaborate with technical advisers, project managers, and operations staff as part of a team to support large infrastructure of labor-management hardware and software.

Weak: Received Employee of the Month honor.

Why it’s weak: “Receive(d)” doesn’t give credit where it’s due and suggests a very passive activity. Better: Earned Employee of the Month honor. OR: Won Employee of the Month honor. Another example: Weak: Received telephone calls from users inquiring how to use specific software. Better: Efficiently responded to user phone inquiries users on how to use specific software

Weak: Assigned to open new branch office.Why it’s weak: “Assigned” fails to recognize that you were probably assigned because your supervisor knew you had the skills to do a great job.Better: Selected by management to open new branch office.OR: Chosen by management to open new branch office.Even better: Selected by management to open new branch office based on superior performance.

Weak: Used technical and fundamental analysis techniques to manage and trade futures portfolio. Why it’s weak: You can usually zero in more directly on a better verb. Better: Applied technical and fundamental analysis techniques to manage and trade futures portfolio. Even better: Deployed technical and fundamental analysis techniques to manage and trade futures portfolio.

Weak: Gave effective presentations to diverse audiences.Why it’s weak: “Gave” is just not the most dynamic verb.Better: Delivered effective presentations to diverse audiences.OR: Effectively presented sales pitch to diverse audiences.

Weak: Used technical and fundamental analysis techniques to manage and trade futures portfolio.Why it’s weak: You can usually zero in more directly on a better verb.Better: Successfully called on major insurance companies and presented firm’s technical capabilities.

Weak: Was a writer for a catalog company.Why it’s weak: A more colorful and descriptive alternative to the verb “to be” is almost always available.Better: Wrote effective copy for catalog company.

Weak: Did a business plan as part of a class project.Why it’s weak: Again, a more colorful and descriptive alternative to the verb “to do” is almost always available.Better: Developed a business plan as part of a class project .

Don’t turn perfectly good verbs into nouns.

Weak: Aid in development and implementation of dealer Web site.Why it’s weak: “development and implementation of” is a wordy noun phrase.Better: Aid in developing and implementing dealer Web site. Weak: Provide leadership for staff of 10.Why it’s weak: You can “cut to the chase” and use a more powerful verb.Better: Lead staff of 10.

Chapter 3: Flawed Formatting or Appearance 36. Blunder: Resume has poor or inconsistent formatting, unclear layout.

Blunder primarily applies to print resumes; formatting for electronic resumes should be stripped down, minimal. See Blunder No. 50.

“A resume should be clear, concise and provide enough relevant information to encourage the phone call it’s meant to generate,” said Human Resources Professional Veronica Richmond of Oakville, Ontario, Canada. My preference is for easy reading, because I see just too many resumes per position to fight a layout that is not clear. I want to find the relevant information easily.” An example of poor formatting that Curtis Pollen doesn’t like to see is “everything lined up on the left margin including name, address heading information.” Pollen, who is senior director of talent recruitment for the American Heart Association, Wallingford, CT, rails when the “content layout doesn’t flow smoothly, for example, [the candidate] will list all accomplishments up front then just provide jobs and dates down below. I like to see what accomplishments were achieved in a particular job to ensure there is a match for the position I am recruiting for.” Regarding electronic resumes, Pollen noted that candidates don’t pay enough attention to how the resume looks when loaded to a job board or his organization’s career site, sometimes resulting in “resumes where everything runs together and is hard to read.” Pollen advised job-seekers to check the format to ensure it looks appropriate before submitting it. Candidates who don’t bother to check the way their resumes print out annoy Jeff Weaver, regional manager for a global information services company, such as when a two-page resume spills over – by just a few lines – onto an unintended third page. Granted, computer incompatibilities often are the culprits for a format that is inconsistent between sender and recipient, but candidates can experiment with sending their resumes to friends’ computers to ensure they print out as intended, and as Weaver advises, tweak the margins or remove unnecessary page breaks to eliminate an unintended straggler page. 37. Blunder: Too many fonts appear in the resume.

Blunder primarily applies to print resumes; font diversity is less important in electronic resumes than using standard fonts, such as Times Roman or Arial.

Job-seekers sometimes believe they can give their resumes more appeal by using multiple fonts, but the wisest rule of thumb is to use no more than two fonts in your resume.

38. Blunder: Resume is too long.

Blunder primarily applies to print resumes. While page length, per se, is not a factor in resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems, conciseness and brevity are still desirable goals.

No consensus exists among employers and recruiters about resume length. Many, especially at executive levels, feel one page is too short. Maureen Crawford Hentz, manager of talent acquisition, development and compliance at Osram Sylvania, Boston MA, particularly disdains “abbreviated or ‘teaser’ resumes” that urge the recruiter, “for more information, call me.” Many recruiters believe that two pages is about the right length; for some, three pages is the outside limit that they will read. “If the resume is longer than two pages, it needs to be well worth it,” noted Hentz’s colleague at Osram Sylvania, Harlynn Goolsby. Others question applicants’ ability to prioritize if their resumes are longer than two pages. Since recruiters pass candidate resumes on to client employers, they must also consider employer preferences. “Most of my clients profess that they are too busy to read anything lengthier – thus, I deliver what they require,” said Chris Dutton, director at Intelligent Recruitment Services and Owner, Intelligent IT Recruitment, Manchester, UK. Recruiter opinions about resume length have been colored in recent years by the growing practice of reading resumes on a computer screen rather than printing them. Resumes that might seem too long in print are acceptable on screen. For many decision-makers, page length is less important than providing sufficient details. “I ... encounter quite a few resumes that have been stripped of any detail in order to confine them to one or two pages,” said Pam Sisson, a recruiter for Professional Personnel in Alabama. “My immediate response is to ask for a more detailed resume. A resume that’s three or four pages but actually shows the qualifications and experience necessary for a position is much preferred, in my opinion, to one that has cut out all the substance to meet some passe idea of a one-page resume.” John Kennedy, senior IT recruiter at Belcan, agreed: “Resume length is of very little importance so long as the information is accurate, verifiable, and pertinent to the position. If a candidate has 20 years of experience directly relating to the position being applied for and that experience is verifiable, it should be listed even if the resume goes four-plus pages.”

Despite the lack of consensus, in the age of Twitter and short attention spans, the pendulum has swung toward shorter resumes, so do

39. Blunder: Resume is one page, but too much is crammed onto the page, or formatting and appearance are sacrificed to fit content on the page.

Blunder primarily applies to print resumes; these issues typically won’t be revealed in resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems.

Some job-seekers, in their zeal to contain their resumes on one page, use teeny-tiny font sizes or cram letters, lines of type, or paragraphs too closely together to be readily readable. (See in Blunder No. 50 how using condensed type negatively affects a resume’s ability to be read by an Applicant Tracking System.)

40. Blunder: Margins are too narrow or wide.

Blunder primarily applies to print resumes; margins typically won’t be an issue in resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems.

If you narrow your margins to keep to a certain page length, don’t go any smaller then .5”. At the same time, realize that Microsoft Word’s default margin setting is 1.25”, which is really wider than it needs to be. Margins ranging from .75” to 1 inch are ideal. My partner follows a literal “rule of thumb” in which he likes to be able to hold a resume with margins wide enough so that his (rather large) thumbs don’t block the type on the page.

41. Blunder: Resume buries important job-relevant skills at the bottom.

Blunder is more applicable to print resumes than resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems.

This blunder is also a content flaw since it shows errors in prioritization.

When a job posting lists specific skills required for a given job, be sure to feature those skills (assuming you have them) prominently in the top third of the first page of your resume. Many job-seekers tend to tack a “Skills” section to the end of their resumes. If specific skills are relevant to your field, list them in your Summary or Profile section. That way, they’ll catch the reader’s eye in the first third of your resume. If you are in the technology field, list your technical skills in a separate section called something like “Systems Proficiencies,” but be sure it’s on the first page of your resume. In a print resume, you may want to set your skills up in a reader-friendly table, as in these samples: Operations Manager Resume and New Grad IT Resume. Don’t use a table in a resume, however, that will be submitted to an Applicant Tracking System. Similarly if language and international-business skills are important in the type of job you seek, list them in your Summary or Profile section, not at the end of your resume. 42. Blunder: Resume is not bulleted.


Most job-seekers these days bullet content on their resumes, but if you haven’t been doing so, use a bulleted style to make your resume reader-friendly. In a research study, use of bullets was the second-highest ranked preference by employers, and density of

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type (paragraphs rather than bullet points) was ranked highly as a factor that would inspire employers to discard a resume. Use bullets consistently. Some job-seekers bullet most of their resume but don’t bullet the Profile/Summary section, for example. Or they will list the overall scope and responsibilities for each job in an unbulleted section before beginning a bulleted section describing accomplishments. Given that the reader can’t easily discern a rationale for why some material is bulleted and other material isn’t, it’s best to bullet consistently throughout the resume.

43. Blunder: Resume has too many bullet points.


This blunder refers to listing too many bullet points for each section of your resume. List 3-4 in your Summary/profile section. List no more than about five for each job you include on your resume.

Especially do not list more bullet points for older jobs than you do for more recent jobs. 44. Blunder: Resume uses a cookie-cutter design based on overused

resume template.

Blunder primarily applies to print resumes; design typically won’t be an issue in resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems.

Resume templates supplied by Microsoft Word have evolved in recent years, but many resume designs are still instantly recognizable to employers as overused or template-based. There’s nothing wrong with templates, per se, except that employers have seen a million of them, so they don’t stand out. The employer immediately senses a certain lack of imagination in the job-seeker. These templates are also somewhat inflexible and contain problematic formatting. “Using a template or any kind of boilerplate to demonstrate your value to a company is the worst thing you can do to yourself when job hunting,” says Nick Corcodilos of Ask The Headhunter. “You’re supposed to be uniquely qualified so the company will choose you instead of some cookie-cutter drone – right? Do you really want a template?”

45. Blunder: Resume is cluttered.


Eliminate clutter. Among the elements can clutter up your resume and impede readability are:

• underlining

• unnecessary dates, such as dates of involvement in professional or civic organization);

• parentheses (no need to set off dates of employment with parentheses; just use commas)

• articles – those little words, “a,” “an,” and “the,” most of which aren’t needed; • the line “References available upon request” (unnecessary and outdated because

it is a given that you will provide references upon request.)

Chapter 4: Flawed Strategy 46. Blunder: Resume is in a functional format or otherwise lacks dates.


A functional resume is also a content flaw, but it indicates a resume strategy that is erroneous overall.

Employers strongly dislike functional formats or even chrono-functional formats because they want to see dates and get a clear picture of how your career has progressed. “I ignore resumes that do not include dates,” said Miriam Torres, president of HRStaff Consulting, an executive-search firm in Miami Beach, FL. In fact, decision-makers will often read your resume from the bottom up to see how your career has developed. “I need to tell hiring managers where you worked, when you worked there and what you did under each job, recruiter Alice Hanson said. “If you are old or haven’t worked in a year, a resume isn’t going to hide that. I’ll figure it out, be sure of that, or I’m not worth my salt. Functional resumes undersell. I assume there is something wrong when I see them.” At Hanson’s former recruiting firm, resumes were reformatted into a standard company style before candidates are presented to employers. “When I went to format the candidate’s resume into our chronological company resume template, functional resumes were pure hell,” she said. “Creating a chronological resume from a functional resume takes time, and time is not what recruiters have much of.” While some job-seekers have successfully used functional formats to de-emphasize problematic elements of their careers, recruiters tend to discount this “de-emphasis” as an attempt to hide something. A functional resume might not completely exclude you, but given a choice, recruiters will always gravitate to chronological resumes. “I haven’t found a time when a chronological resume doesn’t make sense,” said Kristina Creed, a senior manager at a for-profit education provider.

Do not consider a functional resume unless your job history is extremely problematic and you have no other choice. 47. Blunder: Resume file name is “Resume.doc” or “Resume.pdf.”


I know from my experience as a resume-writer that an astonishing number of job-seekers give their resumes the file name “Resume.doc.” Can you imagine how many of these identically named files a hiring decision-maker receives? They don’t distinguish the candidate, and the recipient must always rename the files to keep them organized.

Add your name to the file name and perhaps the month and year you are submitting it: KHansenResumeDec14.doc, for example. Also be sure that your resume is in a file format that the recipient can open. The only file format that is virtually foolproof is one with a .doc extension, but if you have any doubt, do a test run of your attachment by sending it to a friend to ensure the recipient can open it. You can also ask the employer if your file format can be opened on the company’s computers. Further, be sure the file format is compatible with the employer’s Applicant Tracking System. A few employers, for example, request resumes in PDF form, but for most, PDF resumes don’t work properly with the ATS. 48. Blunder: Resume is not accompanied by a cover letter or cover letter is

not targeted to the open position.

Blunder may apply equally to print and electronic resumes, but only if ATS submission site for the electronic resume provides the opportunity to submit a cover letter.

Not all employers read cover letters (about two-thirds do), but to some of the decision-makers who do read them, cover letters are very important. Your resume should always be accompanied by a cover letter. And given that one of the main functions of a cover letter is to describe how your qualifications match a specific job vacancy, it is pointless to send a boilerplate cover letter that is not tailored to the targeted position. Benjamin Smith, corporate recruiter at HR services-provider Mercer, especially eschews “cover letters that are clearly form-written and the job title is inserted into the first line.”

Chapter 5: Your Resume is not ATS-ready 49. Blunder: Resume lacks keywords.

Blunder applies to both print and electronic resumes, but is especially critical for electronic resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems.

Today’s resume must be keyword-rich. As we’ve seen, the majority of resumes submitted to employers today are handled by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), which Wikipedia defines as software applications “that enable the electronic handling of corporate recruitment needs.” The systems store “candidate data inside a database to allow effective searching, filtering, and routing of applications.” Because applicant tracking software and keyword-searchable databases dominate today’s hiring process, successful resumes must feature cutting-edge industry jargon in the form of keywords.

More than 90 percent of resumes are searched for job-specific keywords. Therefore, if you apply for a job with a company that searches databases for keywords, and your resume doesn’t have the keywords the company seeks for the person who fills that job, you are pretty much dead in the water. The summary/profile sections mentioned in Chapter 1 can be important for front-loading your resume with these all-important keywords. (Lack of front-loaded keywords decreases ability to match resume to potential jobs quickly at critical first- and second-level scanning.) Some career experts recommend a section of industry-specific keywords, labeled with a heading such as Areas of Expertise, Core Competencies, or Key Proficiencies. Other career gurus disdain these keyword sections because they list disembodied words with no context. They would prefer to see the keywords embedded in contextual accomplishments statements In a print resume, a keyword section and be contained in a reader-friendly table (as in this sample resume or in this sample resume), but tables don’t work with Applicant Tracking Systems. So, how can we figure out what the magic keywords are? First, we know that in the vast majority of cases, they are nouns. Job-seekers have long been taught to emphasize action verbs in their job-search correspondence, and that advice is still valid. But the “what” that you performed the action in relation to is now just as important. In the following examples, the underlined nouns are the keywords that relate to the action indicated by the verbs:

• Conducted cross-functional management for initial and follow-up contact. • Coordinated marketing campaigns and special events. • Managed customer database, product updates, and upgrades. • Functioned in project-management role.

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• Oversaw procurement, allocation, distribution control, stock levels, and cost compilation/analysis.

And what kind of nouns are sought? Those that relate to the skills and experience the employer looks for in a candidate. More specifically, keywords can be precise “hard” skills – job-specific/profession-specific/industry-specific skills, technological terms and descriptions of technical expertise (including hardware and software in which you are proficient), job titles, certifications, names of products and services, industry buzzwords and jargon, types of degrees, names of colleges, company names, terms that tend to impress, such as “Fortune 500,” and even area codes, for narrowing down searches geographically. Awards you’ve won and names of professional organizations to which you belong can even be used as keywords. There are actually a number of good ways to identify the keywords that an employer might be looking for in any given job search, and we list many of them later in this chapter. But the method that career experts most commonly mention is the process of scrutinizing job postings to see what keywords are repeatedly mentioned in association with a given job title. We offer two examples of how to find keywords in job postings in our article Researching Keywords in Job Postings. OK, so now that we have some good ideas about how to identify keywords, how should they be used? One popular method has been a laundry list of keywords – a keyword summary with no context – toward the top of the resume. As we’ll see, this method is problematic. It still makes some sense to front-load the resume with keywords, however, partly to ensure you get as many as possible into the document, and partly for the phase of resume review in which humans will actually screen your resume (after the initial screening by the search software) and may be attracted to keywords that appear early in the document. A section of keywords can use one of many possible headings, such as “Key Skills,” “Core Competencies,” “Key Proficiencies,” and “Areas of Expertise.” A big note of caution here: Keyword sections are beneficial on resumes when they are entered into Applicant Tracking Systems, but “disembodied” keywords do not rank as highly in the systems as keywords used in context. “More advanced ATS systems will evaluate the context in which each keyword is used,” advises resume writer Karen Siwak, “and will give higher ranking to a keyword that is included within the description of a career accomplishment, compared to one that is included in a keyword table.” Thus, also consider keywords in bullet points in your Summary of Qualifications/Professional Profile, if you have one, and in the bullet points under each of your jobs. Instead of a mere list of words, the summary or profile section presents keywords in context, more fully describing the activities and accomplishments in which the keywords surfaced in your work. This contextual collection of keywords that describes your

http://www.quintcareers.com/researching_resume_keywords.html

professional self in a nutshell will certainly hold the interest of human readers better than a list of words will. Ideally, keywords are tied to accomplishments rather than job duties, so a good way to make the leap from keyword to a nice, contextual bullet point to include in a profile section is to take each keyword you’ve identified as critical to the job and list an accomplishment that tells how you’ve used the skill represented by that keyword. For example:

• Solid team-building skills, demonstrated by assembling Starwood’s marketing team from the ground up to service Starwood International’s 7,700 hotels worldwide.

• Savvy in e-commerce marketing concepts, having participated in designing two company Web sites, and conducting a symposia series to instruct hotel executives in the value of Internet marketing.

Keywords should also appear in the rest of your resume beyond the profile or summary section. Most applicant-search software not only looks for keywords but also ranks them on a weighted basis according to the importance of the word to the job criteria, with some keywords considered mandatory and others that are merely desirable. The keywords can also be weighted and your resume ranked according to how many times mandatory words appear in your resume. If your document contains no mandatory keywords, the keyword search obviously will overlook your resume. Those with the greatest “keyword density” will be chosen for the next round of screening, this time by a human. Generally, the more specific a keyword is to a particular job or industry, the more heavily it will be weighted. Skills that apply to many jobs and industries tend to be less weighty. Since you also don’t know the exact form of a keyword that the employer will use as a search criterion, it makes sense to also use synonyms, various forms of your keywords, and both the spelled-out and acronym versions of common terms. For example, use both “manager” and “management;” try both CRM and Customer Relationship Management. And remember that humans can make certain assumptions that computers can’t. A commonly cited example is the concept of “cold-calling.” People who read the phrase “cold-calling” in your resume will know you were in sales. But unless “cold-calling” is a specific keyword the employer is seeking in the database search, search software seeking “sales” experience may not flag your resume. To determine the keyword health of your current resume, highlight all the words in it that, based on your research of ideal positions in your field, would probably be considered keywords. A good goal to shoot for is 25-35 keywords, so if you have fewer than that currently, try to beef up every section of your resume with keywords, varying the forms of the words you choose. You may be starting to get the idea that a good keyword resume must be specifically tailored the each job you’re applying to. You will especially get that idea if you read our article, Researching Keywords in Job Postings. Indeed, a research study notes that

http://www.quintcareers.com/researching_resume_keywords.html

resumes that aren’t focused on a job’s specific requirements aren’t competitive. Does that really mean you need to create a separate resume for every job you apply for? Yes and no. It’s probably not practical or realistic to totally revamp your resume for every opening. But you can tweak elements such as your professional profile, thus adjusting some of your more important keywords for each job you apply to. Customizing your resume when completing online profile forms at job boards also makes sense.

More Resume Keyword Tips and Cautions: Barbara Safani of CareerSolvers suggests using LinkedIn’s skills section. “Go to your LinkedIn profile,” Safani writes, “and click on the more tab to locate the skills section. Type a skill into the search box and a pull-down menu will appear with alternative skills that are similar to the one you typed in the search box.” If you post your resume on Internet job boards, avoid emphasizing keywords that relate to jobs you don’t want. If you have jobs in your employment history that are unrelated to what you want to do next, go easy on loading the descriptions of those jobs with keywords. Otherwise, your resume will pop up in searches for your old career and not necessarily your new one. Don’t forget about “soft skills,” such as interpersonal and communications skills that relate to many types of jobs. Although soft skills are difficult to substantiate on a resume, they are often listed as requirements in job postings. They tend to be transferable and applicable across various jobs/careers, as well as desirable personality traits. Some job boards have a feature that enables you to see how many times the resume you’ve posted has been searched. If your resume hasn’t been searched very many times, odds are that you lack the right keywords for the kinds of jobs you want. Keep running lists of keywords so that anytime you come across a word that’s not on your resume but that employers might use as a search parameter, you’ll be ready. If you’ve published your resume on your own Web page, keywords can boost that version, including in the resume’s internal coding, since employers may use search “bots” and search engines to scour the Internet for candidates that meet their criteria. Use keywords in your cover letters, too. Most employers don’t include them in resume databases, but a few do. And keywords in cover letters can be important for attracting the “human scanner.” If you’re answering an ad, tying specific words in your cover letter as closely as possible to the actual wording of the ad you’re responding to can be a huge plus. In his book, Don’t Send a Resume, Jeffrey Fox calls the best letters written in response to want ads “Boomerang letters” because they “fly the want ad words – the copy – back to the writer of the ad.” In employing what Fox calls “a compelling sales technique,” he advises letter writers to: “Flatter the person who wrote the ad with your response letter. Echo the author’s words and intent. Your letter should be a mirror of the

http://www.careersolvers.com/blog/2012/04/04/4-ways-to-source-keywords-for-your-resume/

ad.” Fox notes that when the recipient reads such a letter, the thought process will be: “This person seems to fit the description. This person gets it.”

Use our Resume Keywords Worksheet.

50. Blunder: Resume contains formatting that will prevent its being read by ATS.

Blunder applies exclusively to resumes submitted to Applicant Tracking Systems

As we’ve already seen, fancy formatting on a resume can wreak havoc with how it is interpreted by Applicant Tracking Systems.

Jobscan, a site that enables job-seekers to test how ATS-ready their resumes are advises that any resume submitted to an Applicant Tracking Systems should NOT contain:

• Tables, multiple columns, or text boxes. • Complex formatting (condensed or expanded text) – that is, don’t use extra

spaces between letters, because the ATS can’t “read” it. • Headers (including for contact information), footers, templates, borders, lines,

symbols (bullet points are fine) or shading.

http://www.quintcareers.com/keywords_worksheet.pdf

Afterword The beauty of an ebook is that it can easily be updated and revised. I plan to do that with this book.

I welcome your crowdsourcing help in making future editions of this book even better. What question went unanswered and what suggestions do you have? See a typo or other error? Want to suggest a resource?

I welcome all input and feedback. To contact me with your feedback and suggestions:

[email protected] Katharine Hansen, PhD 520 Inchelium Hwy Kettle Falls, WA 99141

Twitter: @KatCareerGal Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kathy.hansen LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/katharinehansen

! About me Katharine (Kathy) Hansen, Ph.D., creative director and associate publisher of Quintessential Careers, is an educator, author, and blogger who provides content for Quintessential Careers. Kathy, who earned her PhD from Union Institute & University authored You Are More Accomplished Than You Think, Tell Me About Yourself, Dynamic Cover Letters for New Graduates, A Foot in the Door, Top Notch Executive Interviews, Top Notch Executive Resumes, and the books in the Quick and Quintessential Guide series; and with Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., Dynamic Cover Letters, Write Your Way to a Higher GPA, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Study Skills.

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.facebook.com/kathy.hansen

http://www.linkedin.com/in/katharinehansen

Documents

Quick and Quintessential Guide: 50 Resume Blunders to Avoidkatharinehansenphd.com/50ResumeBlunders.pdf · 50 Resume Blunders to Avoid Partnering with Recruiters for Job-Search Success