Does Your Resume Make These 5 Mistakes?

Does Your Resume Make These 5 MistakesCreating a resume is both easy and hard. It’s easy because you can create something within a few minutes, hard because there’s so much information available online that it’s difficult to filter out what to follow and not to follow.

If you currently in the process of creating a resume, make sure you avoid making the following mistakes of most folks who are making one.

#1 -- looks like a "normal" resume:
                                    
This happens when you follow advice you find in free Internet articles. Why? Because you're using the same "secrets" as everybody else who searched Google for resume help. Result? Your resume doesn't stand out, and so, more often than
not, it gets passed over for someone else's.
                                    
#2 -- uses "factual" language:
                                    
Here's what I mean by that -- it gives recruiters and hiring managers a sense of what you did in previous roles, i.e. "the facts”, but it doesn't detail how you made a difference, i.e. the impact of what you did.
                                    
#3 -- doesn't contain the right keywords:
                                    
As you probably know, with larger companies your resume gets scanned and stored away in a computer database. If it doesn't contain the right keywords, it's effectively going to be invisible.
                                    
#4 -- is structured "logically":
                                    
What's logical to you or me isn't necessarily logical for recruiters. Your resume needs to be structured so that it gives them exactly the information they're looking for -- in the exact places they expect to find it. Otherwise, your resume is passed over and forgotten.
                                    
#5 -- hasn't evolved with the job market:
                                    
As I'm sure you've noticed, the zeitgeist of your field today is different to how it was, say, five or ten years ago. Recruiters and hiring managers now value and look for different things. Yet many folks are still sending out the same resume from
1991, and genuinely believe it's going to work for them.
                                    
If you want your resume to get noticed, it’s time to stop making the same mistakes that other people are making. Now that you know what they’re doing wrong, it’s time to do a thorough review of your resume and adjust it to what your potential employer might be looking for.  Target your resume to each job you are applying for and don’t make a one size fits all because you will never get the results that you want.

Read 964 times
Alan Carniol

Alan is the creator of Interview Success Formula, a training program that has helped more than 80,000 job seekers to ace their interviews and land the jobs they deserve. Interviewers love asking curveball questions to weed out job seekers. But the truth is, most of these questions are asking about a few key areas. Learn more about how to outsmart tough interviewers by watching this video.