Your Resume’s Top no-nos
Your resume will result in being passed over by the recruiter, at the very least. It can leave a bad impression which lingers in their memory, at the very worst.
Remember, you only have one opportunity to make a first impression. We make sure it is your best.
Your resume should never be guilty of the followings.
- Illogical, unfocused, sloppy or silly formats on your résumé. Formats should be orderly, standardized, practical and symmetrical.
- Formats which are too artistic with multiple fonts, borders, boxes, graphics, and other fluff, often used to hide lack of experience. It is ill-advised to think that a fancy looking résumé will camouflage absence of professional wording and content.
- Byte-heavy embedded pictures, photographs or URL links.
- Spelling errors, typos and poor grammar, syntax and punctuation.
- Laughably trying too hard to sound sophisticated by using words improperly and aggrandizing job titles and descriptions.
- Outright lying and deception with phony dates, claiming diplomas, degrees and other education on your résumé but not actually possessed, inflating importance of job through misleading titles, and fictitious employment.
- Objectives which are too general and therefore tell the reader nothing.
- Introductions which are meaningless and just serve to fill space on your résumé.
- Not listing credentials, licenses, etc. specific to the objective.
- Too many pages because of repetitious job descriptions.
- Inaccurate or missing contact information on your résumé.
- Dense paragraphs which are too long, redundant and rambling; no bullet-points.
- Functional résumés improperly used when chronological style is more appropriate and vice versa.
- Use of personal pronouns and predicate adjectives such as I, me, we, mine, our.
- Important information hidden too far down on your résumé rather than listed at the beginning.
- Including personal information that is not relevant to job or sounds sophomoric.
- Unexplainable gaps in employment or listing every single job even if only two weeks in duration.
- Employment history longer than 10-12 years.
- Dates which are inaccurate, missing or too broad.
- Omitting names of employers and type of industry, product or service experience. Substituting industry for actual name of employer.
- Unprofessional e-mail addresses on your résumé.
- Electronic transmission sent as PDF files and zip files, rather than Word Doc attachments.
