Put Your Best Foot Forward When writing resumes, it’s important to remember that your “best†accomplishments might not be the right ones to list on your resume. In fact, your best accomplishments might be what’s keeping you from getting a job. I’m going to let you in on a secret—resume screeners are opinionated! Imagine that? […]
Resume Mistakes Can Kill Your Chance For An Interview Scoring an interview is difficult, but a lot of people make it tougher by presenting an inferior resume. A good job posting typically draws at least 100 resumes, and quite often as many as 300–500. In mid- to large-sized companies, a significant number of resumes are […]
3 Important Sections of Your Resume I have been reviewing resumes for more than 30 years. During that time, I think I’ve seen it all—from one-page resumes to ones that looked more like small books, weighing in at 30 plus pages. The crazy thing is that the vast majority of people continue to include things […]
Should You Include a Resume Summary? For being so concise, resumes are tricky to write properly. People include all kinds of sections on resumes, and one common section that seems harmless is the resume summary. But is it harmless? And should it be included? Let’s take a look at a few real summaries: Expert, hands-on […]
No Mistakes Resume Checklist: Looking for a job? Don’t do this: Don’t send a resume without a cover letter. Don’t include an objective. Don’t include a summary. Don’t send a resume with mistakes. But definitely do this: Do research on the company and the job. Tailor your resume specifically for the job description. Show them—don’t […]
Resume Mistakes People think recruiters and resume writers exaggerate when we say that resume mistakes kill your chances of an interview. The truth is more complicated than that simple statement. Mistakes do kill resumes, but not for the reasons you might think. Before we go into all of the details of why mistakes matter, let’s look at […]
Every Person Can Have The World’s Best Resume Obviously that title is misleading. Not every person can have the best resume in the world. But if you work at it, you can have the best resume for you. In other words, the absolute best resume that you can make based on your experience. All it takes is a little work. If you […]
Resume Writing Is Not Rocket Science Everyone seems to worry when it comes time to write their resume. Either that, or they rush through the process and end up with a piece of…well, you know. Don’t let it fool you. Resume writing is not rocket science; in fact, it’s not difficult at all. All You […]
When To Take Resume Advice, and When To Ignore It Most people pretend to listen to advice, but they seldom heed it. And nowhere is this more true than with resume advice. I see a lot of resumes. A few are good. A respectable number are okay. But most are poorly written. I try my […]
What Does a Resume Screener Look Like? Before we get started on this, I’d like to ask a few questions. What does a nephrologist do? How about a manufacturing engineer? Clinical psychologist? Disk drive engineer? Pharmacokineticist? Would you know the requirements for each of the above positions? I’d be surprised if you did. But assuming […]
How To Beat the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) Have you ever wondered what happens to your resume once you send it off? Most of it depends on where you sent it, and what type of system—if any—they use for screening. Since most companies use ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems), we’ll focus on that process. (We’ll also […]
3 Rules For Capitalization on Resumes I wrote a post a few months ago about “What To Capitalize on a Resume,” but from the number of emails I receive it’s obvious I didn’t go into enough detail. In this post, I’ll cover a few of the rules for capitalization, and we’ll go into more detail […]
10 Words to Avoid on Resumes Do you struggle deciding which words to use on your resume? Many people do, which prompted me to write this article. I did another post on impact words for resumes, and also one about how powerful words can be in all of your writing. Today, we’ll explore the opposite […]
Power Words For Resumes Words can be very powerful. And since your resume is—by necessity—limited to a page or two, it is important that the words you use have impact. Resumes consist of incomplete sentences and bullet points; you can’t afford to use weak or passive verbs. I compiled this list from many sources, including […]
What Is an Em Dash and How Do I Use It Hyphens, en Dashes, Em Dashes In order to understand an em dash, it’s important to put it into perspective. That means we need to explore a few details on hyphens and en dashes. The following are definitions from CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style). Hyphen […]
Great Resumes Must Be Created I learned long ago that writing the perfect resume was not much different than cooking. If you’re making your favorite dish—let’s say lasagna—you don’t just throw any old thing into the pot. If my wife caught me putting carrots in her sauce, she’d cut an appendage off, and she wouldn’t […]
How To Format A Resume We all know that many resumes end up in the trash. But quite a few get tossed not because of content, but because they look so bad. Before you send out your next resume I want you to pretend it’s the one going for an interview. Then dress it up […]
Right Aligning Dates in Word I read a lot of resumes, and one of the more common problems I see is that the dates are not aligned properly. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a huge deal, but it does make the resume look cleaner and more organized if you right align the dates. And […]
Cover Letter Basics I’ve seen a lot written lately questioning the value of cover letters. Some articles go so far as to say including a cover letter is detrimental. I say bull… nonsense. I’ll address that issue in another post; for today, we’re going to deal with the finer details of writing a cover letter. […]
Why Resume Mistakes Make a Difference I reviewed twenty-seven resumes this week—not many. But the frustration level was high because nineteen of them had mistakes—and yes—mistakes matter. Some were minor: • Lead instead of led. • Compound adjectives used improperly. • Semicolons used when they should have used a comma. • A couple of misspellings, […]
Use or Utilize This post is more for the professional crowd. I may have mentioned that I worked as a headhunter for more than thirty years. During that time, I got a lot of résumés—more than twelve thousand of them. One thing that used to jump out at me was how people tried so hard […]
Make Sure Your Résumé Isn’t Wasting My Time When companies need to hire someone, they resort to what they feel is a process that works, and all too often, it’s a black-and-white decision. It has to be. The person screening résumés has a stack of 200–400 or more applications in front of them, and they […]
Ten Best Words to Put on a Résumé A while ago, I did a post on the ten words to avoid on your résumé. You can see it here. In that article, I mentioned how many of the “go-to” words people typically use are useless. I’m including a table I used in that post to show […]
Rules You Shouldn’t Break When Writing a Résumé The easy answer to that statement is “all of them” but that wouldn’t be correct. As we saw in a previous post, there are a few rules you want to break. The majority of them, however, should be adhered to. So read on for a quick rundown […]
Seven Worst Résumé Mistakes There are a lot of mistakes people make when writing résumés. Some are forgivable and some not. But instead of talking about all the mistakes, let’s just discuss the seven worst résumé mistakes. What Is a Résumé’s Purpose? We’ve talked about this before also. A résumé has only one purpose—to get […]
It Takes a Great Résumé to Get an Interview Before we begin, let’s look at a few things that take a résumé down a peg or two. Spelling mistakes. This may be the number one reason why résumés go into the trash, and yet they’re so easy to fix. A quick run with a spellchecker […]
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