13 Resume Mistakes That Can Cost You The Interview
Posted by Essay Help on November 1, 20091. A BLAND OR GENERIC OBJECTIVE: If your objective could be applied to a marketing resume as easily as a resume for an accounting position, so your objective says nothing and will get you nowhere. An objective is NOT any required paragraph at the apical of the page that is an exercise in 5 lines of job communicate. It’s an actual and real description of your skills as they’re related to who you are and what you deprivation. It should vary with the identify of job for which you are applying.
2. BLAND JOB DETAILS: “Responsibilities included overseeing construction of 4 Hilton Hotels in Tri-City Metro Area, each 50 floors in height.” Yea? So what? That doesn’t have if they went abreast agenda or if you brought the projects in low budget. It doesn’t have if you took all four from computer build or if the guy handling cardinal of the four hotels was fired and you were promoted to overseeing all four. Differentiate yourself from the others coming in to interview. If you don’t tell the hiring company how you will be an asset to them, how will they know?
3. WHO’S THE MYSTERY COMPANY?: Don’t assume the name and purpose of your company is common knowledge. If it’s a competitor, it might be, and if it’s in the same industry and located nearby, it might be. To be on the safe broadside, provide a condemn or cardinal about the focus of your company’s products or services.
4. ANOTHER JOB, ANOTHER PARAGRAPH: Don’t keep adding on to your resume job after job, year after year. By the time you’re in your 40s, you need to have weeded out any of the earlier block. You don’t need all the college activities, just your degree. You don’t need ALL 5 bullets for each of your first cardinal jobs.
5. REFERENCES: Shouldn’t be listed on your resume. “References available on request” is the proper phrase. You present them singly when they’re requested. This isn’t about protocol. This is about protecting your references so they aren’t called until you and the company are capital about each other.
6. IT’S NOT A Account!: Don’t - whatsoever you do, DON’T - compose your resume in the 3rd person!
7. Bounce THE PERSONAL INFO: You might believe your weekend baseball coaching or your church choir participation shows you’re an interesting and all-around person, but they’re irrelevant. If the interviewer wants to know who you are as a person, aside from the job interview and your qualifications, he’ll ask.
8. DEGREE DATE: No matter how old you are, don’t leave the date of when you were graduated off your resume. It looks like you’re hiding something (advantageously, you are, aren’t you?), and so everyone counts the years backwards and tries to figure out how old you are. Sometimes you can be ruled out - just for leaving the date off. If you’re trying to hide your age by not stating the date, what else might you not be forthcoming about?
9. Charm CHECK, Charm CHECK, Charm CHECK: Charm checking visually by you AND individual else, any fewer than threefold, isn’t enough. And don’t forget to check your punctuation.
10. GETTING YOUR RESUME OUT Thither - part one: Don’t consume one of those resume blaster things. Half those sites aren’t even binding. You don’t know how it will come out on the other end. You don’t even know where it’s going or if the landing targets are employment related. It’s bad form and just….NOT the artifact to find your perfect job. Finding your perfect job takes focus, attention, detail, individuality, tailoring, specifics. Resume blasting is about as far from that as you can get.
11. GETTING YOUR RESUME OUT Thither - part cardinal: If it’s an ad, you probably have instructions as to how to send it. If it says email, cut and paste it in the form, AND attach it. You never know what it can look like on the other end because of the difference of settings available to each person. Quite frankly, you’re better off not emailing it at all, because it unremarkably just goes into cyber area, and so it’s all about the hiring company - but regrettably, besides not sending it at all, sometimes that’s your only choice. Emailing your resume takes any option for further participation right out of your hands, because often thither’s not even a name given for a follow up contact. You’ve no other option than to act and admiration. (And half the time it’s going to HR or an admin department to be scanned into an electronic database.)
12. GETTING YOUR RESUME OUT Thither - part III: If you know the company, call and ask if they prefer email, fax, or meat mail. I know a recruiter who never even opened his email. Because he was listed in The Kennedy Guide to Executive Recruiters, he received so many resumes emailed to him cold (so NOT pro-active) that he just did a mass delete every morning. Candidates contacted for a circumstantial examine were requested to meat mail their resume to him. How about that? I’ll bet less than 10% of those who emailed their resumes even bothered to follow capable accompany if it was received (this isn’t a numbers game).
13. RESUME VISUALS: Ivory paper. Black ink. Individual pages. No plastic, 7th grade, ability report cover with the plastic sledder or metal push down tabs. Your name centered at the apical, not on a cover page that says “Introducing Clifton Lewis Montgomery III”. No exceptions. Your resume is a professional document, not a school book report or an art project. Until every resume is done this artifact, yours will allay excel in the crowd.
You are the product, and your resume is the marketing piece. To find your perfect job you must differentiate yourself from the other people who will be interviewed.
Your resume must be circumstantial, individualized, easy to cream so it invites a closer reading, and focused on the differences you’ve made with your previous companies, as advantageously as the accomplishments you’ve achieved with - and for - them. This tells the hiring company what you can do for them - and it IS about the hiring company, not you.
Of course this assumes you meet the requirements for the job - otherwise it doesn’t matter how good your resume is! The resume is what gets you in the door. If your resume is poorly written, looks sloppy, is difficult to read, is cryptic in any artifact, or necessitates being slogged finished to learn your information (they won’t bother), you won’t even get in the door. And how can you decide whether you like the company, if they’ve already decided they don’t like you?
Tags: career, interview, mistakes, new job, resume