Applying for a new job? Avoid these bloopers on your resume
Senior
VP of People Operations at Google, Laszlo Bock, has reviewed over
20,000 resumes in his career. From typos to bad formatting and lies,
he lists some of the common blunders he spots.
Typos
This one seems obvious, but it happens again and again. A 2013 Career Builder survey found that 58 per cent of resumes have typos.
In fact, people who tweak their resumes the most carefully can be especially vulnerable to this kind of error, because they often result from going back again and again to fine tune your resume just one last time.
I see this in MBA resumes all the time. Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality. The fix?
Read your resume from bottom to top: reversing the normal order helps you focus on each line in isolation. Or have someone else proofread closely for you.
Length
A good rule of thumb is one page of resume for every 10 years of work experience. Hard to fit it all in, right? But a three or more page resume simply won't get read closely.
As Blaise Pascal wrote, "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
A crisp, focused resume demonstrates an ability to synthesise, prioritise and convey the most important information about you.
Formatting
Unless you're applying for a job such as a designer or artist, your focus should be on maki n g yo u r resume clean and legible.
At least ten point font. At least half-inch margins. White paper, black ink. Consistent spacing between lines, columns aligned, your name and contact information on every page.
If you can, look at it in both Google Docs and Word, and then attach it to an email and open it as a preview.
Formatting can get garbled when moving across platforms. Saving it as a PDF is a good way to go.
Confidential information
Typos
This one seems obvious, but it happens again and again. A 2013 Career Builder survey found that 58 per cent of resumes have typos.
In fact, people who tweak their resumes the most carefully can be especially vulnerable to this kind of error, because they often result from going back again and again to fine tune your resume just one last time.
I see this in MBA resumes all the time. Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality. The fix?
Read your resume from bottom to top: reversing the normal order helps you focus on each line in isolation. Or have someone else proofread closely for you.
Length
A good rule of thumb is one page of resume for every 10 years of work experience. Hard to fit it all in, right? But a three or more page resume simply won't get read closely.
As Blaise Pascal wrote, "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
A crisp, focused resume demonstrates an ability to synthesise, prioritise and convey the most important information about you.
Formatting
Unless you're applying for a job such as a designer or artist, your focus should be on maki n g yo u r resume clean and legible.
At least ten point font. At least half-inch margins. White paper, black ink. Consistent spacing between lines, columns aligned, your name and contact information on every page.
If you can, look at it in both Google Docs and Word, and then attach it to an email and open it as a preview.
Formatting can get garbled when moving across platforms. Saving it as a PDF is a good way to go.
Confidential information
I
once received a resume from an applicant working at a top-three
consulting firm. This firm had a strict confidentiality policy:
client names were never to be shared.
On the resume, the candidate wrote: "Consulted to a major software company in Redmond, Washington." Rejected. While this candidate didn't mention Microsoft specifically, any reviewer knew that's what he meant.
As an employer I should never hire those candidates.
Lies
On the resume, the candidate wrote: "Consulted to a major software company in Redmond, Washington." Rejected. While this candidate didn't mention Microsoft specifically, any reviewer knew that's what he meant.
As an employer I should never hire those candidates.
Lies
This breaks my heart. Putting a lie on your resume is never, ever, ever, worth it.
Everyone, up to and including CEOs, gets fired for this. People lie about their degrees and where they went to school.
People lie about how long they were at companies, how big their teams were and their sales results, always goofing in their favour.
The problems with lying: You can easily get busted, lies follow you forever and you can get fired, and it's never easy trying to explain that in your next interview.
By
Lifehacker | 140924
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