5 Things Wrong With Your Resume

Writing a winning resume is no walk in the park. You have to know yourself, you have to know your skills and if you want an employer to believe it, you have to believe it. The career website Vault.com talks about some of the basics. Here are 5 tips for you to consider:

Repetition. When an employer looks at your resume, they spend about 30 seconds on it. If you put something, and then you put it again somewhere else on your resume, you’ve potentially just wasted the employers’ time and cost yourself the job. Don’t repeat, anything. Words. Descriptions of similar jobs. Nothing.

Excess fat. Don’t get too wordy. If you get bored reading your own resume, others will too. Don’t take the time to go into too much detail about previous jobs (unless they are relevant to the employer that you’re applying for), ignoring everything that requires you to use first person. At the same time, you want to be sure you get the point across of what kind of importance your previous job held. “Stocked.” “Shipped.” “Packed.” Stocked what? Shipped, packed what? Sometimes, depending on where you worked, those things are self-explanatory. (i.e., you worked at a warehouse.) Tell the employer why your skills from previous employment are relevant to them if they hire you, and no periods on your resume.

The un-bolded beautiful. Don’t undersell yourself. If you were in charge of something or earned an award, ever, at a previous job, in a volunteer experience, from school, make it clear. The employer won’t know if you don’t tell them. Explain how you accomplished a task, what you gained from it, why it’s important to the employer. Always include dates and locations.

Not minding the gap. It happens. People get laid off, they get hurt, for some reason, they have to stop working. Clearly, lying is never a good idea. So here are your options: one, completely skip over the gap on your resume and don’t explain it at all, but be prepared to be asked about it in an interview. Have an answer. Don’t stumble around, trying to come up with an answer because that just looks worse. Two, briefly explain it at the bottom of your resume. Extremely personal details are not necessary, but a basic idea to let the employer know that you were focused on something beyond potato chips and daytime television.

Page two. Two page resumes are for the few and far between simply because it just takes a longer time to read. For that reason, most people stick to one page. Two pagers are for people with lots of really cool, really relevant experience over a period of time (not skipping from job to job!) So consider, if you want to go to two pages and you were an employer looking at your resume, would you without a doubt want to be aware of the information that you’ve provided? If not, then it’s gotta go.