How NOT to Write a Resume - 7 Common Mistakes People Make On Their Resume

if you're in an active job search and you're just not getting the interviews that you're hoping for your resume is probably the culprit and as a corporate recruiter i'm going to share with you the five most common reasons why i'm not calling you on your resume hey everybody it's brian from the life after layoff and today we're going to be talking about the most common mistakes i see people making on their resumes as a corporate recruiter i've seen a lot of resumes and i've probably reviewed tens of thousands of them in my career not only that i've also sat down with hiring teams and the hiring managers and looked at the feedback that they gave on the resumes because ultimately they're the one that's making the decision to hire you so it's safe to say i know what a winning resume looks like and even if you don't have years of relevant experience there are some things that you can do to really stand out amongst the sea of people keep in mind you get five seconds of my attention and if you can't grab me in that first five seconds you're gonna end up in the no pile but there's certain things that you can do to get me to stop pay attention to your resume a little closer and perhaps even reach out to you if you're struggling on your job search and just not sure what you're doing wrong that's something that i specialize in i have a website called lifeafterlayoff.com it is loaded with tips and tricks on how to get noticed by recruiters get through the interviewing process and land the dream job that you've always wanted i also have a training called the ultimate layoff boot camp now this is not just for people who've been laid off but anybody that's looking for a better position now it's seven hours of dedicated training going through the entirety of the hiring process at major corporations so leave a link for that in the description if you want to check it out mistake number one is bad formatting when you write your resume you really want to make it as easy as possible to read so no weird or strange fonts let's stick to the basics sans-serif or serif fonts also avoid any weird colors black is the safest one and i just recommend using black across your entire resume also consider using some white space we don't want to see massive blocks of text as a recruiter when i open up a resume it can look really intimidating if i see a ton of text no paragraph breaks and just an entire page just jammed full of words and honestly the text is too intimidating and i don't feel like taking the time to dive into it i'm just going to skip on to the next one keep in mind that recruiters at major corporations are seeing anywhere from 200 to over a thousand applications per role we simply don't have the time to decipher hard to read resumes the goal should be to make it as quick and easy to digest we need to scan through your resume very quickly find what we're looking for and then make a decision whether we're going to call you or not so you really want to make it as easy on the recruiter as possible to get that phone call by making your resume nice and easy to read the second common mistake that i see is giving too much information a lot of times it's also dealing with that same formatting issue that we just talked about where you have a massive amount of text you have a lot of information in there and i as a recruiter don't need to see all that stuff and for some reason tenured employees seem to feel the need to justify their long careers by adding in light items for every single thing that they did it's not uncommon to see people listing a dozen or more tasks that they did for each employer now when you have five or six employers on your resume and you've got a dozen bullet points for each one do the math that gets to be a really long resume and most of the time it's just tasks here's the thing recruiters don't care about tasks we care about accomplishments that's the stuff that we want to see on your resume listing out things like i ran a daily report to figure out inventory levels is stuff that i don't need to see that is a task that stuff doesn't help me make a decision on you it simply tells me that you're good at doing the daily tasks it doesn't make you stand out in any way because everybody else doing similar roles is also doing those same daily tasks what you want to do is focus on the major career highlights those story arcs in your career that you can draw from and i'd expect to see no more than four to five major accomplishments per role if you find that if you've written your resume that's longer than two pages it's time to sit down and ruthlessly edit person who's been in the workforce for a long time should only need two pages maximum now some fights going around that you should consolidate everything into one page sometimes you need a little bit more than that to tell an accurate story so i'm fine with going to two pages but don't go to the third page there's no reason why you should need that much real estate be ruthless with what you put on your resume and only stick to things that are going to sell you mistake number three is not adding dates or an extension of that not adding dates in chronological order for some reason there's some advice going around about people not using chronological dates and that they really focus their resume on the skills that they think recruiters want to see but for me that's bad advice if you've got 10 years of work history and two employers listed on there and the most recent employer is a management job or it's a perfect fit for what i'm looking for and i jump in and start asking you questions maybe it turns out that you only have six months of relevant experience in the most recent one but nine and a half years in the previous job which wasn't relevant it becomes a much different picture about whether or not you're truly qualified not to mention we also look for some longevity in roles we want to see some commitments there and past performance is the best indicator future performance so if you have a history of only lasting six to eight months in a row we can probably assume that you might only last six to eight months in our role so we like to see those dates and if i don't see those dates on your resume either two choices i can call you and try to go through an arduous task of putting together that puzzle with you or i can just skip your resume and move on to the person who does have the dates which one do you think i'm going to do as a recruiter again you want to make it as easy as possible to get the recruiter to call you if you're worried about ageism and let's face it that's a relevant concern there are ways to round that as well the main thing that i would recommend there is to take your most recent experience the relevant stuff that i'm looking for as a recruiter and make that the majority of your resume and then stuff that's early in your career you can just list that down at the bottom as other employment and then you can just list the titles and you don't have to put the dates before we get too far into it make sure you consider subscribing because i actually put out new content each and every week it's loaded with tips and tricks on how to get noticed by recruiters get through the entirety of the interview process and land that dream job you're not going to want to miss a post mistake number four is not writing your resume with the recruiter in mind a lot of times people write resumes with the thought that they're writing it for what they would want to see or they're justifying things that they've done in their career and stuff that's important to them you got to keep in mind from the recruiter's perspective how we look at resumes when we get a new role we sit down with the hiring manager and we go through what's called an intake call that intake call then calibrates us as the recruiter and the hiring manager to the qualifications the experiences the skills and the education needed for this person to be successful in that particular role we then create a job profile when we take that job profile we then start to recruit against it if you're writing your resume based on what you want to see on your resume and not what i'm recruiting for the chances of you matching up to my profile are very slim and you're just going to be reducing the chances of me calling you for that interview so you want to use the job posting as a clue to what i as the recruiter would be looking for and try to tailor your resume to match that mistake number five i see this one all the time it's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine i kind of chuckle when i see it people who write generic fluff a lot of times you'll see this in the summary section but i've also seen it in the job accomplishments area as well now what's an example of some generic fluff saying things like i'm a team player or i have excellent interpersonal skills that stuff is pure fluff and doesn't tell me a single thing about you as the candidate it's certainly not going to be enough to get me to pick up a phone and call you to set up an interview what makes you special from all the other 300 plus candidates that i'm talking to for this role because i got news for you every other one of them is good at handling customer complaints in a timely manner instead tell me how you improved the process or affected the bottom line of the business mistake number six is adding non-value added information listen if you're an experienced candidate i don't need to know what hobbies you're interested in or that you volunteer for your church's youth group at this point in your career that stuff just isn't important enough to put on your resume and it's certainly not going to lead to a phone call so unless it's directly related to the type of career that you're going after or the job that you're interviewing for don't include it now an exception to the rule is if you're a new college grad or somebody that's looking for an entry level role in that case it's probably okay to include that stuff the next mistake is including pictures and or graphical elements into your resume just from a discrimination perspective don't include a photo i don't want to know what you look like i don't want to know how old you are i don't want to know anything that's not job related besides photos on resumes are very common overseas and if i see a photo on your resume i might assume that you need sponsorship and a lot of cases my company can't do a sponsorship so maybe i don't call you you're just giving yourself another reason why a recruiter will screen you out now of course we're not talking about linkedin that's a whole different ball game you definitely want to have a nice quality photo on there same goes for graphical elements if you're using graphics on your resume because you think it's going to stand out and really think about it the goal of your resume is to get me to focus on your accomplishments and anything that distracts me from that is actually counterproductive to the end purpose of your resume now of course if you're a graphic designer you're probably going to want to have some level of design in your resume because that's directly related to what you're doing but for the rest of you just stick to clean and basic layouts now the last mistake that we're going to cover is related to templates now i have no issue with using templates because i actually use them myself and i've created them for some of my students however i would advise using them with caution i've seen a lot of different sites out there that offer resume templates and to be honest with you a vast majority of them are pretty bad usually the work of a graphic designer who thinks from a graphic design perspective and not a recruiter's perspective so they're going to give you a lot of the mistakes that we talked about earlier in this video so if you're going to use one just try to stick to a clean concise template something that's going to be easy to read and avoids those common mistakes and make sure that you change those generic details like your contact information because you don't want to have a recruiter not be able to contact you because you forgot to change that now if you've been following along with your own resume and you're making some of those mistakes it's time to maybe do a tweak on that and remember writing your resume is a fluid process it's not something that you do once and once only and you forget about it so even if you hire a professional to write your resume it's still something that you're going to update continually it's not a once and done thing this is a skill that you need to develop throughout your career so get in the habit of frequently updating your resume something's not working make a tweak keep on trying it eventually you'll find something that works and you'll be well on your way to getting noticed by recruiters and landing your dream job hey if you found value in this video would really appreciate a thumbs up because that actually helps other people find the content that they're looking for and if you haven't done so already consider subscribing because i'm bringing out weekly videos on how to get noticed by recruiters get through the interview process and land your dream job i appreciate you watching and i will see you on the next one

Channel: A Life After Layoff

Views: 67,488

Keywords: how to not write a resume, common mistakes people make on their resume, biggest resume mistakes, common mistakes in resume writing, common resume mistakes, fix your resume, how do i fix my resume, how not to write a resume, how to write a resume in 2020, mistakes in resume writing, resume mistakes 2020, resume mistakes examples, resume mistakes video, top resume mistakes to avoid in 2020, what not to include on resume, what not to put on a resume, job search after college

Id: 0T2R_WqLcI0

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020