Things NOT to Include or Do on a Resume
Personal Information
Aside from contact information, there’s no room for personal information on your resume. The majority of personal information you would include are items that would be illegal for a potential employer to ask during an interview such as age, race, religion, marital status, and whether you have children – therefore, you need to leave this information off of your resume/application. Resumes are strictly designed to outline your professional qualifications for a job.
It’s also important to avoid putting unrelated information on your resume; this includes listing hobbies, volunteer activities, and religious organizations. Listing these types of things should be avoided unless it is somehow directly related to the position for which you are applying.
Personal Photo
Unless you are in the entertainment industry and a headshot is part of the job, you should never include a personal photo on a resume. Photos distract the hiring manager from looking at what’s important: your qualifications. A resume is supposed to highlight career accomplishments and how you can provide value to the company for which you are interviewing. Employers don’t want or need to be drawn into a situation where a subtle bias based on appearance could come into play.
Dates
Although some dates are necessary on a resume, such as dates of employment, remove unnecessary dates. For example, although you need to list the school(s) you have attended and the type of degree(s) you received, leave off your graduation year/date as it can reveal age. The only time you may want to include the graduation year on your resume is if you’re young and have very little work experience. Those who have just graduated from college usually don’t have much work experience so including the graduation year shows the hiring manager that you were occupied with school.
Also, keep in mind that often employers will disregard a resume if you leave off exact dates of employment. Always include month and year in your dates of employment.
Grammatical Errors and Typos
“The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.” – Randall
According to a Career Builder survey, 58% of employers identified resumes with typos as one of the top mistakes that led them to automatically dismiss a candidate. Using the correct spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in a resume/application is essential. Everyone makes mistakes, but certain aspects of life really should be faultless. What does it tell the hiring manager about your work quality when they are presented with a document riddled with errors? Your resume/application is your best chance to present yourself in writing as the ideal candidate for a job, so scrutinize it (and have someone else scrutinize it) for accuracy before sending it in.
Not Including Relevant Experience
When you’re writing a resume, the experience section of your resume provides detailed information about your employment history. This is the real heart of your resume, and the more years you are employed, the more decisions you will have to make about what to include and what to leave off in this section. You do not have to include every job that you have held. Typically, a resume will have information about your most recent 10 to 15 years of experience. Beyond that timeframe, you do not need to include details unless the positions are relevant to the position for which you are applying. Entry-level employees, who do not have a lot of on-the-job experience, should include every job possible, including internships and summer/temporary jobs.
Failure to Tailor Your Resume
You may be tempted to attach the same resume to ten different job applications, speedily applying to jobs into the wee hours of the night. Break this habit if you want to increase your chances of getting hired. It is vitally important that you tailor your resume to the position description, and use the appropriate keywords. This doesn’t mean copying and pasting the job description keywords into your resume and hastily adding them. Instead, think of relevant accomplishments that describe these hard skills. For example, proving you’re “detail-oriented” translates into “Organized a contact database of 3,000 clients to leverage direct sales.”
Poor Resume Formatting
A traditional resume is a simple, straightforward document. To stand out, some people go overboard with multiple colors, numerous typefaces, excessive bolding and/or italics, unusual bullet points, and more. As a rule of thumb, stick to one or two typefaces. It’s common to use one typeface for headers and one for the body text. Whether you use one typeface or two, be sure to choose common, polished-looking fonts such as Helvetica, Arial, Georgia, or Times New Roman. Simplicity is the key to legibility.
A few additional items to keep in mind
- Responsibilities/Achievements: Use a bullet point format, not paragraphs, to list your job responsibilities/achievements. Use action verbs at or near the start of each statement. Provide proficient details about your current and previous job responsibilities to allow the hiring manager to determine if you have the experience and skill set needed to perform the job.
- Tense: As a general rule, use the past tense if an action or accomplishment on your resume is in the past. However, use the present tense if you are speaking about a current role and accomplishments. Hiring managers cringe when they see this mistake on a resume, so as you’re editing, be sure to use the correct tense: manage vs. managed, deliver vs. delivered, execute vs. executed.
- Capitalization: While proper nouns—names of companies, managers/supervisors, and schools, for example—should be capitalized, common nouns should not. Some job seekers have a tendency to capitalize certain common nouns for emphasis, but this is a mistake and should be avoided.
- E-mail Addresses: If you do have an email address that seemed catchy when you created it, but now leaves you slightly embarrassed, set up a separate professional email address for your job hunting. It would be a big mistake to use an old email address like BeerLover123@gmail.com or CuteChick4life@yahoo.com.
- Consistency: Although it may not immediately spring to mind, catching errors in consistency is an important part of proofreading your resume. Check to make sure that the dates have all been formatted in the same way (i.e. month/year). Ensure that if you bolded your job title, you did so every time. If you notice extra spaces, remove them—this includes extra returns between paragraphs or spaces at the beginning of a line. Ideally, your resume should be consistently formatted, easy to scan, and laid out logically.
- References: Be sure to list at least three (3) professional references on your application and resume. Include people who are aware and can speak highly of your accomplishments, work ethic, skills, education, performance, etc. Make sure you list their name, phone number, email address, and professional relationship (i.e. boss, co-worker, etc.). Avoid listing family members or friends as a reference.
- Delivery Format: You’ve spent hours formatting your resume and getting the bullet points to line up perfectly. Don’t lose that perfect format by sending/uploading a resume as a Microsoft Word doc. Use a PDF to ensure a clean delivery.
