3 Major Mistakes to Avoid in Your Resume
The first impression is often the last in the corporate world.
If you are on a job hunt, your resume is the ticket to securing or losing a job. So, it is important to design resumes properly by covering the essentials.
Resume writing practices have changed tremendously in the last few years due to emerging trends and technological shifts. Unfortunately, despite the availability of information, around 90% of resumes received by employers today lack proper format. In this post, we discuss the 3 major mistakes common in resumes and share some tips to optimize them according to the standards.
What Is the Purpose of a Resume
Resume is a brief outline of your personal and professional background for recruiters and hiring managers to review. It includes your education history, academic achievements, skills, and experiences that help recruiters decide the right match for the job.
The purpose of a resume is to simply get you a call from the company. It has to make somebody reach out to you and that is it.
Once you connect to the person over call, you can talk about your experiences and introduce yourself. So there’s no point of adding extra details or writing your complete life story.
3 Common Mistakes in Resume
Recruiters all over the world work under extreme pressure. When it comes to the candidate search, they only skim through the resume in a few seconds rather than reading all the details. This is why your resume has to include the essentials to catch their attention in that few seconds span.
Unfortunately, the majority of people miss these points and they make three common mistakes in their resume.
Let us review these three mistakes one by one:
Mistake 1: Unclear Goals
If you don’t state your objectives clearly, the hiring manager or recruiter can’t understand whether you completely fit in the job role or not. Your objective must clearly tell what kind of a job you are looking for. It should a crisp and concise statement readable in a single glance.
An example objective can be, “Seeking a role of Full Stack Engineer where I can utilize and polish my coding skills to ensure swift software development”.
If we break it down into three parts, the first tells us the role an applicant is interested in. It is important particularly when you are planning to switch to a different role from your previous job. Not mentioning the role makes the recruiters assume you want to continue working in the same field and keep doing the same job.
As for the second part, it highlights your abilities and lets you stand out among the other applicants. It tells what you are capable of doing and what skills you have.
Whereas the third part describes how you will help the company or what you will make them achieve through your efforts.
Most people are unaware of the power of objectives, so they write generic objectives to target various opportunities, which creates ambiguity. Therefore, it is important to state clear objectives to secure your position in the pile of people receiving the call.
If you have diverse skills and want to amplify your chances of being selected, you can create different versions of your resume with different objectives to target the job posts accordingly.
Read about the high in demand concepts of Object Oriented Programming
Mistake 2: No Proof of Experience
The second biggest mistake is mentioning your activities on your resumes without any solid outcomes. It is like plainly telling about the code you wrote, the modules you tested, the people you managed, or the links you fixed without stating the results it produced.
Recruiters want to see how you can make a difference. They don’t need to read a boring list of tasks that you can do in a team.
Professionals understand the importance of their efforts and this is what the companies value them for. Nobody just hires you for your skills, rather, they want to know the impact your work had on the project or team you managed.
Consider two examples, “As a part of the team Z, I was able to write Python code to develop several modules”
And
“As a part of the team Z, I was able to write Python code to develop several modules that led to 15% increase in sales of products by new customers”.
Now take a look at both examples and tell which engineer sounds more experienced and reliable. Ofcourse, the second who has specified the impact of his work.
This is why it is important to show the potential recruiters what you can bring to the table.
Check out the guide to master 20 coding patterns
Mistake 3: Lengthy Information
If you overstuff your resume with information, it gets wordy and exceeds the limit. Your resume should ideally be one page long minus all the extra stuff.
Scan through the resume and remove all the content that is not relevant to the position you are applying for. Also, keep revising and updating the information to include only the latest content in your resume.
Avoid lengthy paragraphs and divide your information into smaller chunks under proper headings.
You can set a minimum margin and keep your font small to maintain the page limit. Moreover, you can use a customizable resume template to add your information in the given sections.
Jump onto the next section to learn to optimize your resume in simple ways.
Quick Tips To Optimize Your Resume
Before you hit the send button, make sure you go through the checklist.
Here’s our version of quick tips to help you optimize your resume.
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Keep it concise and avoid unnecessary details
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Use bullet points and a proper format
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Mention relevant skills and expertise
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Bold the important keywords to grab the attention
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Add online links to your projects
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Insert numbers where applicable
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Use action verbs in your statements
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Follow the same font consistently
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Add the correct contact information and provide a professional email address
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Pass your resume through a tool to cross-verify for grammatical errors
Find practical tips to navigate your coding interview smoothly.
Conclusion
Designing resumes can be an excruciating process for beginners without proper guidelines. Our guide highlights the three major mistakes people commonly make in resumes. To ease this process and help you create a professional-standard resume, we recommend best practices. Also, make sure you avoid outdated information, lengthy paragraphs, and irrelevant details. Finally, review your resume before sending it to the recruiter, or use a tool to identify grammatical errors.
For expert guidance and resume optimization, join the Interview Bootcamp by DesignGurus.io.
