The Biggest Mistakes I See on
Resumes, and How to Correct Them
I've sent out
hundreds of resumes over my career, applying for just about every
kind of job. I've personally reviewed more than 20,000 resumes. And
at Google we sometimes get more than 50,000 resumes in a single week.
I
have seen A LOT of resumes.
Some
are brilliant, most are just ok, many are disasters. The toughest
part is that for 15 years, I've continued to see the same mistakes
made again and again by candidates, any one of which can eliminate
them from consideration for a job. What's most depressing is that I
can tell from the resumes that many of these are good, even great,
people. But in a fiercely competitive labor market, hiring managers
don't need to compromise on quality. All it takes is one small
mistake and a manager will reject an otherwise interesting candidate.
I
know this is well-worn ground on LinkedIn, but I'm starting here
because -- I promise you -- more than half of you have at least one
of these mistakes on your resume. And I'd much rather see folks win
jobs than get passed over.
In
the interest of helping more candidates make it past that first
resume screen, here are the five biggest mistakes I see on resumes.
Mistake
1: Typos.
This
one seems obvious, but it happens again and again. A 2013
CareerBuilder survey found that 58% 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 their resumes
just one last time. And in doing so, a subject and verb suddenly
don't match up, or a period is left in the wrong place, or a set of
dates gets knocked out of alignment. 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.
Mistake
2: Length.
A
good rule of thumb is one page of resume for every ten years of work
experience. Hard to fit it all in, right? But a three or four or ten
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
synthesize, prioritize, and convey the most important information
about you. Think about it this way: the *sole* purpose of a resume is
to get you an interview. That's it. It's not to convince a hiring
manager to say "yes" to you (that's what the interview is
for) or to tell your life's story (that's what a patient spouse is
for). Your resume is a tool that gets you to that first interview.
Once you're in the room, the resume doesn't matter much. So cut back
your resume. It's too long.
Mistake
3: Formatting.
Unless
you're applying for a job such as a designer or artist, your focus
should be on making your 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.
Mistake
4: 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! There's an inherent conflict between your
employer's needs (keep business secrets confidential) and your needs
(show how awesome I am so I can get a better job). So candidates
often find ways to honor the letter of their confidentiality
agreements but not the spirit. It's a mistake. While this candidate
didn't mention Microsoft specifically, any reviewer knew that's what
he meant. In a very rough audit, we found that at least 5-10% of
resumes reveal confidential information. Which tells me, as an
employer, that I should never hire those candidates ... unless I want
my own trade secrets emailed to my competitors.
The New
York Times test
is helpful here: if you wouldn't want to see it on the home page of
the NYT with
your name attached (or if your boss wouldn't!), don't put it on your
resume.
Mistake
5: 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.
(Google "CEO fired for lying on resume" and see.) People
lie about their degrees (three credits shy of a college degree is not
a degree), GPAs (I've seen hundreds of people "accidentally"
round their GPAs up, but never have I seen one accidentally rounded
down -- never), and where they went to school (sorry, but employers
don't view a degree granted online for "life experience" as
the same as UCLA or Seton Hall). People lie about how long they were
at companies, how big their teams were, and their sales results,
always goofing in their favor.
There
are three big problems with lying: (1) You can easily get busted. The
Internet, reference checks, and people who worked at your company in
the past can all reveal your fraud. (2) Lies follow you forever. Fib
on your resume and 15 years later get a big promotion and are
discovered? Fired. And try explaining that in your next interview.
(3) Our Moms taught us better. Seriously.
So
this is how to mess up your resume. Don't do it! Hiring managers are
looking for the best people they can find, but the majority of us all
but guarantee that we'll get rejected.
The
good news is that -- precisely because most resumes have these kinds
of mistakes -- avoiding them makes you stand out.
In
a future post, I'll expand beyond what not to do, and cover the
things you *should* be doing to make your resume stand out from the
stack
Laszlo Bock SVP, People Operations at Google
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140917045901-24454816-the-5-biggest-mistakes-i-see-on-resumes-and-how-to-correct-them?trk=eml-mktg-inf-m-top14-1210-p2
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