Two-Dollar Words Many people think that the bigger the word you use the better it sounds. They seem to equate the number of syllables, or scarcity of word usage to sounding scholarly. What these people don’t understand is that the trick is not to find the biggest word, but the word that works best in […]
Resume Killer What Are The Biggest Resume Killers? Resumes are complicated—at least that’s what many people think. But in reality, they are one of the simplest documents to write. Despite being simple, a lot of resumes from qualified people end up in the trash. Why? Sometimes it’s a single item, at other times it’s a […]
3 Things Every Resume Should Have If you want to make a difference on your resume, a real difference, make sure to include these three things. The items I’m talking about are these: #, $, %. The symbols don’t have to be on there but what they represent should. Not every resume will have them, […]
25 Impact Words For Your Resume (Most of this is an excerpt from one of the chapters in my book, No Mistakes Resumes.) Your resume should be filled with impact words. Words can be very powerful. Think of the emotions some of these simple statements generate: “I love you.†“I hate you.†“You are so […]
What To Capitalize On Your Resume Capitalization Many people who write resumes have an inclination to capitalize damn near everything. Perhaps they think that by capitalizing words, those words, or the functions they represent, become more important; ergo, the person becomes more important. (Did I just use the word ergo? I did, didn’t I? Smack […]
Resume Tools I’m going to start this post out discussing tools. You might wonder what tools have to do with resumes but you’ll see they have a lot in common; in fact, your entire resume is a tool, and it consists of hundreds of other tools—words. When you mention “tools,†most people think of a […]
When Should You Write A Resume? The technical answer is you should write a resume when you have a position to apply for; however, you should keep a document that resembles a resume updated at all times. Anytime that something occurs in your work history that you might want to put on a resume, update […]
What Is the Best Resume Format? First, let’s talk about… Formatting Mistakes Note: Part of this I’ve taken from the formatting chapter in my book, No Mistakes Resumes. A lot of people pay no attention to the resume format, but that’s a huge mistake. Formatting deals with the readability of your resume, and that affects […]
Responsibilities Dilute Your Message Responsibilities take up a huge part of most resumes, and that’s unfortunate. I say unfortunate because the space most people devote to responsibilities could be used much more effectively. If you have a compelling reason to list responsibilities, follow these few rules: Keep it simple. Keep it short. Keep it relevant. […]
Let’s Take A Look At Resumes By definition a resume is: …a brief account of one’s professional or work experience and qualifications. …a set of accomplishments …a brief written account of personal, educational, and professional qualifications. Please note the words in italics: experience, qualifications, accomplishments. That’s what a resume is about. A Resume Isn’t About… […]
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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