Avoid These Ten Common Resume Writing Mistakes Next Time

Re-publishing the original article published at JobsFeeder.com for the informational purposes of the viewers of my personal blog.

Preparing a winning resume found to be daunting task for many and it needs couple of day’s effort to make it fine-tuned to deliver the correct impression to its audience. Your resume delivers the first impression about yourself to recruiters when assessing whether you are a good fit for their organization or not.

When preparing a resume, it’s easy to make mistakes. Once you make a mistake it’s exceptionally difficult to repair the damage once an employer gets it.

Therefore prevention of following common mistakes found to be critical for your success, whether you’re writing your first resume or revising it for your next job search. Check out these resume guidelines to the most common pitfalls and how you can evade them.

1. Typos and Grammatical Errors

Resume needs to be grammatically impeccable. If it isn’t, recruiters will come in to conclusions about you, like: “This person can’t write,” or “This person obviously doesn’t care.”

In order to avoid these common mistakes, you can use the built in spelling and grammar feature on your word-processing software. Still if you are not convinced with the content, call for a help. Probably a friend of yours could add value to your resume by reviewing it. Else contact a resume fine tuning service such as JobsFeeder.com.

We at JobsFeeder.com offer no cost quick review service for the first comers. If you are happy with the review outcomes, there is a fee based service to convert your resume in to stylish and winning resume.

2. Lack of Specifics

Employers always after what you’ve done and accomplished already. Look in to the following examples;

• I worked for a blue chip fortune 500 company as an Operations Manager.
• I worked at Infosys as an Operations Manager between 2003 and 2005. During the period I recruited, hired, trained and supervised more than 40 employees for the business unit. Grew the annual sales values from $2 million to $ 6 million.

Both of these phrases could describe the same person, but the details and specifics as in example B will more likely attract the employer.

3. Attempting One Size Fits All Approach

Whenever you try to develop a one-size-fits-all kind of a resume to send to all employers, you always end up with something employers will throw in the recycle bin. Employers want you to write a resume specifically for them based on the opportunity. They expect you to clearly show how and why you fit with the announced position in their organization.

4. Highlighting Duties Instead of Accomplishments

It’s easy to make a mistake by simply start listing your job duties on your resume. As an example:

• Attended meetings and recorded minutes.
• Worked as a team member.
• Updated project documents.

Employers, however, don’t pay any attention so much about what you’ve done. Their interest is towards what you’ve accomplished in your job roles. They would be more happy to see statements more like these:

Used a voice recorder to record weekly meeting minutes and compiled them in a Microsoft Word-based file for future organizational reference.

Proposed and developed a company-wide knowledge base to maintain the meeting minutes and any other materials required for continuous development.

Identified a major performance drawback within organizational processes. Worked with the relevant departments to update them over the issue and rectify it to increase the productivity levels.

5. Too Long or Too Short

Regardless of what you may read or hear, there is no real principal resume length. Reason: human beings, who have different favourites and anticipations where resumes are concerned, will be reading it.

That doesn’t mean you should start sending out 200 page log resumes. Generally resume lenghth need to limit yourself to a maximum of two pages. But don’t feel you have to use two pages if one will do. On the contrary, don’t cut the meat out of your resume simply to make it conform to an arbitrary one-page standard.

6. Poorly written Objective

Employers do read what’s on your resume as the objective, but too often they come across with similar objectives, “Seeking a challenging position that offers professional growth.”

Making your objective unique or giving employers something specific and, more importantly, something that focuses on their needs as well as your own. Example: “A challenging entry-level managerial level position that allows me to contribute my skills and experience in company’s retail operations.”

7. No Action Verbs

Avoid using phrases like “responsible for.” Instead of that, use action verbs: “Resolved user questions as part of an IT help desk serving 100,000 doctors, nurses, therapists and the academics.”

8. Leaving Off Important Information

You may be tempted, for example, to eliminate mention of the jobs you’ve taken to earn extra money for your higher education purposes or to cover your college fees. Typically, however, the soft skills you’ve gained from these experiences (e.g., work ethic, time management, teamwork) are more important to employers than you might think.

9. Visually Too Busy

If your resume is wall-to-wall text featuring five different fonts, it will most likely give the employer a headache. So show your resume to several other people before sending it out. Do they find it visually attractive? If what you have is hard on the eyes, revise.

10. Incorrect Contact Information

Double check whether entered phone number, mobile number or the email address is still active. If possible disclose a time to contact over the phone number avoiding your other responsibilities. Make sure to keep your phone switched on during the disclosed hours. In case if you are not available to take the call, ask someone to answer it, disclose the identity and the relationship, explain your unavailability with a reason and collect a time to call back. If not ask them to take down the message clearly.