by Trevor Gelder, Corporate Director
Talent Acquisition and Deployment
When it comes to your resume, there are a few things to bear in mind: Keep it simple, and ask yourself, are you getting a return on the investment on your resume space?
- Objective: Why? Is it really valuable? If you applied for a construction superintendent spot and your objective says your objective is to find a job as a construction superintendent, your objective doesn’t add any value to the resume. Worse yet, if it says something other than what you applied for, it could hurt your chances of securing an interview. If it doesn’t add value, leave it off.
- References available on request: Why? Do you think the employer would assume you would not have references? Again this is an old tradition that adds no value to your resume. Leave it off. If you are asked in for an interview, then bring a separate page of references with you at that stage.
- Readability: Is it easy to read? I can’t tell you how many resumes I have received that I have to decipher. The harder it is to read, the greater the chance you will be overlooked. The really hard-to-read resumes often get set aside and are only examined if we don’t find a great candidate in the easy-to-read resume pile.
Dont’s
- Don’t use all caps.
- Don’t bold everything.
- Don’t try to fill every inch of white space.
- Don’t use a tiny font just to make it fit on fewer pages.
- Don’t use fanciful fonts.
- Don’t cut and paste the same responsibilities into each company.
- Don’t use a ton of acronyms. Even if the acronyms are widely used in your industry, your resume may go through the hands of people who aren’t “in the field” and won’t recognize them. Worse yet, they may think they mean something else. We recently filled an IT Director position, as I read through the resumes for potential candidates I kept reading on how the implemented ERP. In IT that means “Enterprise Resource Planning,” but in HR that means an Employee Retention Plan. Keep in mind acronyms can also be departmental, company- specific or regional.
- Don’t rely on the import function on a job board to make sure your resume looks correct. Check and clean it up as necessary.
- Don’t get overly technical or detailed when describing your position, especially if the duties are fairly typical of the position.
- Definitely DO NOT include: age, marital status, race, height, weight (yes, people do this), number of children, church affiliation, photo.
Another great article that may help is here: http://www.bnet.com/blog/evil-hr-lady/how-to-write-a-resume-dos-and-donts/1630?tag=blog-moreFromRight