9 Biggest Mistakes to Avoid In Your Resume

 Here are 9 of the biggest mistakes to avoid  In Your resume; not correcting them will instantly make your resume appear antiquated:

• The One Page Rule

Don’t spend countless hours trying to squeeze a decade or two of valuable experience onto a single sheet of paper. The worst thing you can do is try to make the font smaller or eliminate space between lines. If you do, your resume is too hard to read. The best way to gain extra space is to decrease the margins. Use 1/2 an inch instead of an inch. The good news is that the one-page resume no longer rules, as today’s hiring manager is more likely to be scrolling down on a screen than flipping to the next page. In fact, for experienced professionals a two-page resume is the most common format. There are obvious exceptions, such as recent graduates and entry-level applicants who can easily fit all of their experience on one page without sacrifice. For seasoned pros, however, even three- and four-page resumes are not uncommon and are acceptable today. Printing double sided will get you two pages for the price of one, and can impress companies who are environmental oriented.

• Using Ancient Fonts

A “font” is the style and shape of the words on your resume. The right fonts are modern and easy to read. The wrong fonts are ancient and difficult to read. The right fonts are Arial and Helvetica. The wrong fonts are Times New Roman and anything else too fancy. If you have your resume in Times New Roman font, like many of us do, change it to Arial. You’ll be amazed at how much cleaner, modern and more professional it looks.

• Writing in Paragraphs instead of Bullet Points

Your resume is an outline, not a novel. Use bullet points to highlight your experience and education, with short sentences or phrases. Don’t write in long block paragraphs that tell a story. It makes your resume much harder for a human to “scan” quickly, and is likely to cause your resume to be thrown into the rejected pile.

• Using a Street Address

Including a City and State is fine, but there is no reason to include your actual Street Address. The employer isn’t going to be notifying you of an interview by snail mail. Skipping the street address is good for you for two reasons. It helps prevent both identity theft and junk mail. Since many job ads are from companies that choose not to reveal their names, you never know who you’re sending your resume to, so skip the street address and keep yourself protected.

• Not Including an Email Address

Yes, you may have emailed your resume to the recruiter, but it’s still important to have your email address on your resume, as well as your phone number. Listing an email is not just a matter of convenience. It says, “Yes, I am part of the modern world, please hire me.”

• Using an Objective instead of a Summary

Objectives are out and Summaries are in. The reason is an Objective tells the employer what you want. A Summary tells the employer who you are and what you can do for them. Your Summary should be about 2 or 3 sentences that state what job you are applying for, and a brief explanation of your career highlights. You should be able to read your summary section out loud in 30 seconds or less.

• Ignoring Keywords

Resumes are scanned by computers as often as they are read by humans. The software is designed to scan resumes for the keywords chosen by the employer. If you don’t have the right keywords, your resume never gets selected to be read by a real human. There are two ways to manage keywords. The easy way is to simply include a keyword section (don’t call it that, call it “Core Competency”).The harder but better way of using keywords is to place them throughout your resume in the descriptions of your work and school experience. It’s more natural, and will score better with the actual human recruiter. The secret to knowing the right keywords is that they are usually in the job add. If you see a list of skills required, a certain educational degree, or specific licenses or other qualifications, those are all keywords. Any unique words could be keywords, but things like “strong work ethic” are never keywords.

• Stating Obvious Computer Skills

Don’t list common technology on your resume. We all know how to use Microsoft Word, Windows, Internet Explorer, Twitter and Facebook. We all know how to use an email program. For upper-level applicants, it is already inferred that you possess the entry-level technical skills that were needed to successfully rise through the ranks. Listing them would unnecessarily lend your overall presentation a lower-level feel, which you would obviously want to avoid.