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#JobSearch : 5 Mistakes Most People Do When Creating Resumes. Job Hunters Must Focus on How their Resume Comes Across to Businesses.

A resume is often the first piece of contact between an employer and an applicant. Gone are the days when we could pop into an office and talk to future jobs; there’s no initial face-to-face anymore unless you make it to the interview stage. Instead, job hunters must focus on how their resume comes across to businesses. 

A surprisingly large number of seemingly small mistakes can cause your resume to fail. So instead of letting any of this drag you down, here are the top ones to watch out for and how they could affect how a company views you.

Overlooking Typos and Grammatical Errors:   Sentences that have obvious typos, poorly phrased grammar, and no forethought can be hard to read.  An entire resume of those can be nearly impossible to bother with.  Many companies won’t admit this, but resumes with too many typos or glaring errors never make it past the first stage.

The main reason for this fail is because it shows a lack of an eye for detail. Companies want employees who put effort into things that need it, and if you can’t put any effort into your first communication with them, how can they trust you to work hard for their company?

A simple pass through a spellcheck system can be good, but if you want to take it further, you ask someone you trust to read over your resume a couple of times. Unfortunately, although reading it over yourself may catch some, we tend to be less capable of detecting our errors.

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Article continued …

Including Information Just To Fill It Out:  You may think that the longer your resume is, the more impressive it is: but that’s not the case if it’s all a bunch of filler. Filler is anything unnecessary but gets added to fill out the text or make the document longer.

“Companies will either think that you’re lying about other parts of your resume and are trying to hide it: or they’ll assume that you don’t understand what skills are vital. Including one job you worked for ten years and did well in is more important than padding it out with many small jobs you did throughout the years. Less can be more, as long as what you include has value.”

Marla DiCarlo, CEO of Raincatcher

 

Avoiding, or Leaning Too Far Into, Style:   Infographic resumes were a fun and quirky style of applying to a job in the early 2010s, but most companies aren’t interested in these. Some larger businesses don’t even view resumes until after they’ve been scanned through a filter of things they want from an employee: this could leave your resume unread if you over-format it and try to get too cute with the design. The biggest mistakes are over-formatting, changing the background color to something too bright, or having the text almost illegible because it’s in a dozen different colors.

On the other hand, you should ensure there’s at least a little personality to it. Don’t make the rookie mistake of applying with every header, sentence, and link at the same size and style. As a society, we’ve moved past applications in twelve-point Times New Roman. You can also play around with minor changes, like your text’s alignment, what order you place things in, and how you word each part of the document, but be careful.  You don’t want to go overboard.

 

Add just enough personality to make it feel right for you, but don’t go too far off the deep end.

 

Missing the Opportunity to Word Things In Your Favor :  Show off your accomplishments instead of just saying what work was thrust upon you in previous jobs. This could mean explaining how you lead a team and what you achieved with that team, instead of simply saying that you were given a team to lead. Think about it as an action story instead of a product description on a grocery store’s website.

 

Attempting One Resume For Every Job:  If you’re desperate for work and applying for a ton of different jobs, you’re not alone!  The problem comes when you apply to every single job with the same application and wording. You want to make companies feel like it’s their specific business you’re interested in and make it clear that you know which job you’re applying for. Of course, you might be applying to hundreds over the period of a week, but tweaking the wording and ensuring you include only relevant information can give you the boost to the top of a company’s interest.

 

Your Resume Is An Advertisement For Yourself:  When you’re sending out resumes, you’re attempting to show businesses the value you can offer them. View it as trying to show off a product, but the product is yourself. It would help if you were honest about what you’re capable of, polish it up to look attractive to anyone reading, and have a little humor and intrigue to make them interested.

 

FSC Career Blog Author:  Andrew Nelson is a freelance writer and contributor in the Human Resource Industry. He specializes in topics such as workplace management, employee lifestyle and fringe benefits, employee retention and employee development. 

 

FSC Career Blog – May 20, 2021