Your resume is the document that opens the doors of opportunity throughout your professional life. Properly done, it will get you into conversations with the people who can hire you. Think of the work it requires creating a killer resume as the effort you put in towards creating a firm foundation for a successful life and give it the attention its importance demands.
Mistake #1: Use the Wrong Email Address
Your email address is one of the first things anyone sees about you and binkypoo@yahoo.com is the perfect opportunity for shooting yourself in the foot. This might be a good time to create a new professional email address that you use exclusively for your communications with the professional world.
Use a name that reveals something about the professional you, such as SystemAnalyst@gmail.com. This type of email address acts as a headline to tell the reader who you are and what the communication is about.
When your idea for a name is already taken, try adding your zip code SystemAnalyst11579@gmail.com or area code SystemAnalyst516@gmail.com; these variations are more likely to be available and both offer useful information to an employer in your local market. Similar variations can also work: SystemAnalystBoston@gmail.com and the like will also work.
Mistake #2: Don’t Bother with a Target Job Title
Everything you read, watch or listen to has a title; it’s what draws you in. Recruiters use job titles in their resume database searches, yet, upwards of 80 percent of resumes don’t have one.
Use a target job title at the start of your resume and make it more discoverable while giving the reader immediate focus. A target job title comes immediately after your contact information, at the top of your resume.
Mistake #3: Focus on What You Want
Start your resume with Job Objective and you send the wrong message: you are telling the potential employer that you are more interested in your needs than theirs. Your resume is a selling tool that introduces who you are and what you have to offer, not what you want to receive. Besides, no one cares what you want until an offer is on the table, so your resume should focus on getting you to the offer and that begins with focusing on what your customers want to buy.
Replace Job Objective with Performance Profile / Summary. Every manager’s job involves performance management and they spend time every year writing performance reviews and this headline will resonate immediately.
To understand what your customers want, collect half a dozen job postings and prioritize their common needs. Then, using Performance Profile as your headline, take the top priorities and turn them into four to six lines about your skills in these areas — or, if you are just coming out of school, your desire to develop skills. This will help your resume’s discoverability and speak intelligently to recruiters.
Mistake #4: Don’t Mention Required Skills
Adding a Professional Skills section, right after your Performance Summary, makes your resume discoverable in database searches and helps the reader recognize a match quickly.
Think of this section as an electronic business card that allows you to network with computers. Capture your professionally relevant skills in single words or short phrases and place them in three columns. The positioning of such keywords (near the top of the document) helps your resume’s ranking in database searches and gives the recruiter or hiring manager that necessary fast visual accessibility — recruiters only take six seconds for an initial scan. Fail this scan test and your arse is grass.
Remember to use each skill again in the context of the jobs in which you applied it; this doubles the discoverability of your resume and puts your skills in their proper context for the reader.
Mistake #5: Live By Yesterday’s Rules
The old rule of one or two pages for a resume is outdated. Technology has made all jobs more complex, so that they require more space to tell the story of your skills. Besides, your resume has to be data-dense to be discoverable in resume databases.
Think about this: no recruiter is going to read the second page of your resume thinking, “What a great candidate this is,” only to turn to a third page and suddenly decide not to talk to you because your resume was too long. Let form follow function.
Mistake #6: Use Font Sizes No One Can Read
No one in a position to hire you can read an 8 or 10 point font. Using tiny fonts with serifs (curly, cutesy bits) annoys everyone whose eyesight has been weakened by prolonged computer use — and that means everyone in a position to hire you. Your resume must be in a font and font size that recruiters and hiring managers can read.
It’s another case of letting form follow function. If it takes three pages to tell a properly focused story and make it readable in a Sans Serif 11/12-point font, just do it.
Mistake #7: Don’t Customize Your Resume
Your resume is a template of what you bring to the table, but it is a template nevertheless and should be customized for each job application to most closely reflect how that company prioritizes, thinks about and describes your target job. Job titles and their responsibilities may be similar from company to company and most, but not all of the words used to describe a job’s deliverables, translate from one company to another, but if a job is worth applying for, then your resume is worth customizing.
Mistakes Kill Careers
Avoidable mistakes in your resume — the document that opens the doors of opportunity in your life — can cost you a job and perhaps with it the break that would have lead to a successful career and there is no excuse now that you know how to avoid them.
<Source: monster.com>
