5 Resume Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Let's talk about resumes at some point in your life probably sooner than you think you're gonna have to write one of these things and whether you're applying for a job or an internship or in some cases even a scholarship your resume is likely to be the first thing that the decision-maker sees when they're evaluating you which means they're important now because these things are so important than any recruiter or hiring manager is obviously gonna give every single one that received the utmost care and attention right wrong in reality most resumes are never actually seen by a human recruiter and if those that actually do make it to a recruiters desk most are unceremoniously thrown in the trash after just a few seconds and this is just a numbers game in fact Google alone gets over 1 million resumes per year and that breaks down to over 2,700 a day now those numbers seem daunting and it can be a little bit intimidating but there is some good news because a lot of people make some really common mistakes on their resumes that can put them out of the running and if you could learn to avoid those mistakes you're gonna have a huge leg up on the competition so today we are going over 5 of the worst resume mistakes you can  the first big mistake we're gonna go over is a tendency for people to write their experience section in a way it lists their job duties rather than their jobs accomplishments but the thing is employers do not care about what you were expected to do at your last job they care about what you can do for them and they want to see concrete examples from your past experience that point to that and since most of them are not albus dumbledore and they don't have a Pensieve sitting in the corner they can't just peer into the past and watch you at work which means it's your responsibility to clearly and succinctly show what you accomplished in that little amount of space you have here's an example from my own resume during my senior year I had a job on campus at a research department and I got hired as a web developer and I did maintain the website I did make changes to it but at one point I also had a small probably three-hour project where I created an automation script that ended up saving the company about 240 hours of work and since people they were getting paid about 9 bucks an hour you can do the math on how much money that saved now even though the project only took me a few hours to do in the eyes of a hiring manager it would have been by far the best indication to my creative problem-solving abilities and my ability to save their company money in the future out of anything I did there now you be thinking to yourself right now I don't have a story like this I haven't saved a company ton of hours or thousands of dollars yet but what you do have is the ability to make your achievements as concrete as specific as possible and to quantify them to look at another example for my resume during my junior year I was a resident advisor at my University and I could have just said helped to smoothly run a community of students but I put 62 students because that gives a more concrete and quantified example of how many students I was managing big mistake number two is believe it or not typos and grammatical errors and you might be thinking this is the most obvious boring tip that could ever be on a video like this but it needs to be said because I myself have fallen victim to it during the summer before my sophomore year I was getting ready for the career fair and I created what I thought was the perfect resume I had a ton of experience tons of clubs tons of part-time jobs that I could show off I was thinking I'm gonna go into that career fair and I'm going to crush all the competition but to check off all the boxes I decided to get a resume review from my career counselor first so I go into her office I sit down and I'm thinking this is gonna be a five-minute meeting she's gonna give me a gold star and say Thomas this was the best resume I've ever reviewed but instead she pulls out a red pen and starts marking stuff up and as she's marking things I start to see that she's marking out typos things that I did not catch myself and I thought my resume was perfect so if you can get your resume review to buy your career counselor and if you can't at least have somebody that you trust who isn't you run over it before you start handing it out because we are always more scrutinizing and more careful when we're proofreading somebody else's work than our own the third big mistake is listing all of your experience and purely chronological order instead of its relevancy to the position you're applying to a lot of people think they're actually supposed to list their experience in chronological order but this is something that you shouldn't do because you really don't have a whole lot of time to catch the recruiters eye so you want to put the most relevant thing first in fact according to a study done by the ladders comm recruiter spend an average of just six seconds looking at a resume before throwing it into the trash and going on to the next one so if you're computer science major applying for a job and last summer you did an internship and software development where you literally built and shipped software but then after that you just like worked at Burger King during the year you definitely want to put that software development internship at the top because the recruiter and a computer science company is not going to care so much about Burger King now you can definitely go too far here which means that there is a balance that has to be struck in fact I got an email from somebody in their mid-20s recently who asked me if it would be a good idea to put the mission trip they did when they over eleven years old on their resume and as I was trying to answer that person's question I imagined myself as the hiring director of looking at that person's resume and all I could think of is that something like that on a resume is gonna look like just grasping at straws I'm gonna think why isn't there anything else you've done in the intervening 15 years that deserves to kick that thing off the resume now maybe this doesn't apply to people who have already had long and illustrious careers who have 20 page CVS and tons of awards on their shelf in their office but if you are just looking for an entry-level position or you're just a few years into your career then recency does matter the fourth big mistake that is really common to students especially is placing too much emphasis on paid work a lot of students think that if they didn't get paid for it it doesn't really count and it doesn't belong in that experience section but here's the thing employers don't actually look at it that way maybe you're like Ron Swanson you've been working in the quarry since you were 12 years old and you have tons of part-time jobs you were paid for that you can put on your resume but most students don't have that kind of experience for the most part when students are looking for their first entry-level job they don't have a whole lot of paid work under their belt and when they do it's often stuff like working at Subway or flipping burgers or working as a cashier honorable work to be sure but it often doesn't exemplify the traits that recruiters are looking for in more technical positions but many times those same students have volunteer experiences extracurriculars and clubs where they did gain experience and what the recruiters are looking for and if that's you you should definitely put those experiences right at the top of your experience section don't hide them away in a clubs and volunteering section and that brings us to our final big mistake on the list which is using the same resume to apply for every single position you go for this is a huge mistake because again you've got just six seconds to catch a recruiters eye so make sure you're tailoring your resume to every single position that you're applying for if you're an active student and it's more than likely you have a diverse set of experiences and skills so when you're going for a position ask yourself what are the exact skills that are going to look the best to a recruiter hiring for this position and make sure you tell your resume to show those things first if you have both freelance writing experience and coding experience then a writing job is going to take a different resume than a coding job and the other important thing to note here to be honest is that using the same resume to apply for every single job is downright lazy and it shows which is bad because honestly one of the top qualities that recruiters across every single industry is looking for is a clear indication that this candidate is going to go above and beyond and I can kind of wait and hear myself at this point because I actually have eight people on my team now and what I'm looking to hire somebody the top qualities in my mind are clear work ethic a clear ability to solve problems independently and culture fit if somebody doesn't take those three boxes then their technical skills don't really matter to me and on the flip side if they do check those boxes and they have a slight deficiency in the technical skills that often doesn't matter because I know as long as they're a quick learner and can solve problems I can train them in those technical areas now when it comes to your resume the best way you're going to demonstrate these qualities is by letting your past accomplishments to speak for themselves by making sure that experience section shows off accomplishments in a very clear and specific way but tailoring your resume to the company and showing that you put effort into the application process goes a long way as well now that being said when it comes to showing off those more intrinsic qualities your resume is not the best tool for the job honestly those are probably got to come out most in the interview when you have real face-to-face interaction with that hiring manager but before the interview happens another great tool for showing those qualities is having a website if you have your own website then you can build a portfolio that shows off your work in the way that it was meant to be seen you can show it off in all its details and you can also show the process that you used which shows your work ethic and your problem-solving abilities.