As you know, one of the most significant factors in your attractiveness to an employer is your resume. You create your image in it, be it education, work experience, or personal interests – in other words, you expose yourself as a specialist in the job market. Obviously, the nicer the label, the greater the likelihood of a successful sale of the “product”. And in this case, it is not even about what and what you will write in this or that column of your resume, but about how attractively you will make it look. For example, according to HR of the well-known MIT company Lily Chang, if all the points in your resume are not convenient and accessible and cannot be skimmed, it may not be viewed at all. Fortunately, today you don’t have to be an experienced Photoshop user to make your resume stylish and informative – for this, there are quite a few dedicated portals that will do everything for you, you just need to provide information.
When writing a resume, many job seekers try to include as much information as possible in it. But in this case, the principle “the more the better” does not work. The fact is that a recruiter spends less than a minute when first meeting your resume, which means that when writing a resume, it is better to use the strategy “brevity is the sister of talent”.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common resume writing mistakes.
What makes resume proofreading so important
Are you looking for professional cv proofreading services? Resume proofreading is time consuming because to polish a cv so it looks nice and neat can`t be quick but thoughtful. This is why it is highly important to apply for help from a resume writing and proofreading company or agency providing its services online. A team of online proofreaders where every proofreader is master of his craft will do his best for you on the way to an excellent resume and a job of one’s dreams.
Links accounts in social networks
Your photos may be very popular among Instagram users, or you may have a ton of achievements in online games on Facebook, but as a rule, this will not give you a particular advantage over other candidates rather, on the contrary. Therefore, links to social networks should be placed on your resume only if your position is related to social marketing, or the employer directly indicates in the job description that they want to see your profiles on social networks.
Non-core skills and abilities
It will also look inappropriate in the resume to mention skills and abilities that do not intersect in any way with your profession and the type of activity of the employing company. So, if you are applying for the position of an accountant, then you do not need to describe what kinds of pies you can bake, and a baker should not write about participating in poker championships. But if you, for example, are applying for the position of a programmer in a company engaged in professional radio communications, and at the same time you are a radio amateur, then the mention of your hobby may attract the attention of the employer.
Basic knowledge of a foreign language
If you only learned Chinese at college, and in adulthood used it only a few times on vacation in China, then you should not even mention this in your resume. It makes sense to write about your knowledge of a foreign language only if you have real experience of communication in a business context. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting into a very awkward situation when, during the interview, your interviewer asks you a question in a foreign language.
Standard computer programs
The ability to use text editors, email and search engines on the Internet, in the modern world, is equated with the skills of reading and writing. Therefore, the mention of such skills looks like the phrase “I wrote this resume myself.” But if you know how to use specialized programs, for example E-Staff for recruiters or AutoCAD for engineers then their mention will seriously increase your chances of success.
Skills that don’t exist
You can often find a recommendation to write in your resume the skills and knowledge that the employer writes about in his vacancy. But this is a very risky path: if you describe what you do not know in reality, the deception will most likely be revealed even at the interview stage (for this, professional HR-s have their own tricks) or in the first days of work. For example, having written in the resume about the missing experience of transferring data from one version of some program to another, you can fail the interview on the question “Tell us in more detail how you did it?” Or, mentioning non-existent professional experience with Excel spreadsheets can lead to the fact that on the first day of work you will be entrusted with the tasks associated with editing the most complex table with cross-references between sheets, pivot charts, and cascades of formulas in cells.
Outdated skills
This section contains software and techniques that no one uses anymore. For example, mentioning MS-DOS or AutoCAD version 2.0 from 1984 with the latest version 22.0 from 2017. Or the ability to use a fax.
Listing of personal traits
At the dawn of recruiting, it was very fashionable to list your positive personal traits at the end of your resume. But the problem was that all applicants wrote about the same set of traits, without comparing these words with reality. Usually this list looked like this: sociability, attentiveness, purposefulness, active life position, benevolence, well-bred speech, presentable appearance, responsibility, attentiveness (we have added two easter eggs to this list for the attentive reader;).
As a result, recruiters and employers simply stopped reading the section “Personal traits” and prefer to find out the personal traits of the candidate they are interested in at a job interview.
Many people ask a question: is it really difficult to create a resume?
The answer is obvious: creating a simple resume is not difficult, many websites are full of ready-made templates that you can download or fill in such templates right on the website.
But think about it, an HR manager spends about 8 seconds looking at 1 resume. If during this time he does not see the “necessary” words and phrases, then he simply proceeds to view the next resume. And your resume, no matter how highly qualified you are, simply does not work.
And HR-managers have a special attitude to a “template” resume – as with a person who does not think about details, who has decided to find a job in a hurry, without making any effort, in one click.
Moreover, many highly qualified specialists, in their field, face difficulties when writing a resume. After all, creating a “pass”, successful resume is a kind of marketing and requires many PR skills, which not all applicants possess.
… agency provides services for the writing, editing and proofreading of resumes by professional writers who work with resumes for many years.
They know many subtleties that the applicant may not even guess about!
After all, it’s all about a resume – a document that is your business card. Its task, like a regular business card, is not only to provide professional information about you correctly, but also to create a favorable first impression of the applicant. Here, such an important document should not be allowed to be created from a template. Even written, according to all the rules for the design of such documentation.
If you want to have an edge over your competitors, you need to be different from them. And first of all – the presence of a correctly composed resume. It should:
- make the employer want to get acquainted with it in full;
- contribute to the invitation to an interview of the owner of such an interesting document.
Only a competent resume, with an emphasis on your individual strengths, the preparation of which is best entrusted to experts in this matter, observing not only a business style, but having its own uniqueness and professional attractiveness, will be able to provide the required result.
By contacting … writers, you will become the happy owner of:
- an individual, successful resume without unnecessary information;
- a resume that will highlight your most important professional traits for an employer with scrupulous precision;
- a document that subtly distracts attention from your weaknesses.
Let us help you reach the goal of your search!