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, get fired for this.
(Google "CEO fired for lying on resumes" 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.
