LATEST UPDATE:
The Biggest Mistakes I See On Resumes - Google Head Of HRThis post was posted on LinkedIn by Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google. Enjoy!
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 your resume 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.
You can check out the source for some nice rebuttals.
Source:
http://ift.tt/1ucO4YR from http://ift.tt/19pR9bQ
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