Resume Do’s & Don’ts
First Impressions - Your Resume
When you submit your resume for review to a role, and your resume makes it past the initial ATS review, one of the first things a recruiter is going to do after reviewing you qualify to research you. They may research your LinkedIn, your Social Media profiles, Google your name, etc. Why do they do this? Ultimately, this is to protect the company, or in the case of a placement firm, their clients from a hire that is not well suited for their organization. What are the sorts of things they are looking for? Let's start with your resume.
Your Resume
To start, I will tell you that your resume will get about a 3-second look-over before an employer decides to review it more thoroughly or deems it not a fit. That’s it. When you are reviewing hundreds or thousands of applicants for multiple roles, a resume needs to stand out. How can you work to increase your odds of being noticed? Read on!
First and foremost, PDF your resume! Please do NOT submit your resume unless it is in PDF form! I cannot stress this enough. If your resume comes in a Word, Google Doc, or Pages format, it does not translate into the ATS system correctly. All of your efforts in formatting, ensuring your spacing, and the like are correct are lost. The document will appear as though paragraphs are wrapped incorrectly, spacing and formatting are ruined, etc. In addition, a PDF can be more easily viewed within the ATS system and not downloaded.
If your resume needs to be downloaded to be viewed, a recruiter may think twice about considering that candidate due to company guidelines on external downloads. With the uptick of viruses in documents, ransomware, etc., it’s not safe to download a resume that comes from an external source that you don’t know. That could mean that your resume isn’t even considered for contention for the role.
Unfortunately, you will then get a generic rejection letter and not understand why they didn’t even consider you. So I will repeat this strongly, only send your resume in PDF format!
Resume Improvements
The next topic we will address is what should and should NOT go on your resume.
First, I would suggest that you always have someone else review your resume that has not seen it before. What does your resume say about you and what value you can bring to a new company?
Second, I would recommend that you should never put anything on your resume that the prospective interviewer or employer is not legally allowed to ask you. This is very important. People are people and while all employers will strive to not have bias in their hiring protocols, your resume will be seen by usually at least 5 sets of eyes and a resume that volunteers personal information can increase the chance that bias will creep in.
At the time of this writing, the current items (according to the EEOC) that a prospect is not allowed to ask you include (but are not limited to):
Age
Where you live
Race
Religious or Political preferences or affiliations
Disability
Other items that an interviewer is not allowed to ask in certain states is what your current or previous salary is - please do not volunteer that information. We will discuss this more in-depth in the interview section.
For a complete list of EEOC guidelines, please visit: EEOC.gov/employers/small-business/What-Shouldn't-I-ask-when-hiring
This is a great resource for candidates when updating their resumes to ensure that 1. The interviewer is compliant, do you want to work for a company that violates these rules? And 2. That you are not eliminating yourself from consideration with an outdated resume.
Age:
One mistake I see often is offering up your age. One way is to list too many roles, especially ones that are no longer relevant. Unless the role pertains directly to the role you are applying for, anything older than 10 years old is usually not shown. The second with regards to age is listing the dates of your high school (which shouldn’t be on your resume past your first or second job) or your college. Putting down the year of your college graduation, again, unless it’s a resume for your first or second job, you don’t need the dates, just the school and degree.
Address:
Another mistake is listing your actual address. It’s not necessary to list your home address, rather you can list the metro. Ie: Instead of saying 123 Main Street, Oakland, CA, or 45678 Main Avenue, NYC - put down SF Bay Area or Manhattan, NYC. The employer will see you’re within commuting distance and that’s all they are allowed to ask anyway.
*Note: It can get tricky with some companies attempting to pay according to geo-locations for remote workers. I think that it’s incredibly tacky to pay someone based on their location vs paying what the job is worth. I have turned down many a role that insisted on that type of compensation.
Email:
The next item is a good email address. You will want to ensure that the email you list on your resume is:
Correct
You would be amazed at how many emails are mistyped on the resume and will bounce back as undeliverable. If the recruiter or prospective cannot reach you, they will move on to the next candidate. Game over for that role.
Current
If you still have an AOL or Hotmail email address for example, it could appear that you don’t keep up with the current technologies. Consider setting up a Gmail account just for your job search and be sure to check it regularly!
Professional
It still astounds me some of the inappropriate email addresses that will occasionally come through on a resume. I will not get into examples here, but if you cannot say it at work lest you be accused of harassment, don’t use it as your email address on your resume!
Accomplishments:
When listing your experience, be sure to list what you accomplished. Tasks are great for Receptionist, Admin, and Office Manager roles, however, once you have advanced to an Executive Assistant level, one expects to see more accomplishments than tasks. For example, it would be great to quantify what you did. If your role was able to save the company X dollars resulting in a Y percentage improvement, you should list that.
Summary section:
This one is very much disputed. Some people like it, and some think it’s a waste of resume space. What looks best in my opinion is not a summary of what the candidate has done, but rather what the skills of the candidate will bring to the role, how that will benefit the company that they are applying to, and how this particular candidate will solve the problem that they currently have in their company. Tell the employer what you can do FOR them, not what you want FROM them!
Professionalism:
Always spell check and proof your resume. Do not send drafts, misspelled, editing mode, etc. Nothing says you don’t have attention to detail like sending out a resume with errors.
Do not write your experience in paragraph form. No one has time to read through a novel, just to see if you may or may not be qualified. Bullet points are best and you can still expand on your experience in bullet point form. Your goal is to make it easy for the person reviewing your resume to see what a wonderful fit you could be! Remember that recruiters, hiring managers, and employers receive thousands of resumes, and they need to be able to sort through them quickly.
