Looking to land your dream job? Before you send out your spruced-up resume to employers and recruiters, ensure that you aren’t guilty of making the following mistakes.
“To obtain a position enabling me to utilize my strong communication and leadership skills that offers growth and advancement opportunities ..” Does your resume start out with such a vague statement? If yes, remove it now. Hiring managers literally spend a few seconds on each resume, and you’d lose the race before even it started. Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, President of Career Trend suggests replacing the objective with a focused headline and profile summary that markets your value to alleviate a company’s pain. Make it as relevant as possible for the job position you are applying. e.g. A preschool teacher can summarize herself in the following way: “Passionate early childhood educator with over 8+ years of experience in cultivating young children’s learning through emergent curriculum. Fluent in English & Spanish.”
Most job seekers just list out responsibilities and duties in their resume. An often repeated advice is to use metrics to quantify your contribution e.g. “Implemented XYZ marketing strategy to increase sales by 35%”. But what if your job profile makes it difficult to come up with these hard numbers?
Review your resume multiple times to get rid of any grammatical mistakes. Michelle Lopez, Founder of One2One Resumes offers the following excellent tips for proofreading:
Use consistency in font sizing and bullet point styles. If you are making the employer names as bold and dates as italics, do it consistently through out the resume. Be careful of the whitespace related issues between paragraphs and the margins.
You are being hired for your skills and the value that you’ll add to the organization. Your age or marital status has no relevance in most job applications. You should leave them out in your resume.