When Catelyn Sanders accepted a job in the HR department of an advertising agency in Boston, little did she know she'd spend more than 90% of her time filtering resumes.
"Some [mornings] there'd be hundreds of e-mails in my inbox. It was my job to screen the 100 possibly-qualified applicants into the 10 or so."
After weeks of spending full days slogging through individual resumes, Sanders developed an efficient way to get through them: "If a resume was at all hard to read it got deleted--sadly that could be half the pool. It got to the point where it just wasn't worth my time."
Sidebar: 10 Real-Life Resume Mishaps
Stories like Sanders' aren't uncommon. Executive recruiter Skip Freeman receives nearly 200 resumes a day. "If a job-seeker reaches out to a headhunter or recruiter," he says, "their goal should be to break through the clutter and get our attention." But common resume mistakes like formatting can make the difference between breaking through that clutter or winding up in a delete folder or recycling bin.
With the help of Freeman, headhunter Charley Polachi and Doug Arms, chief talent officer of Ajilon Professional Staffing, ForbesWoman got to the bottom of the biggest resume pitfalls--and how they can be avoided.
"Call it suspicion by omission," says Arms, "but if something's left out, it raises flags that can disqualify an applicant from the running."
Leaving off a home address, for example, may lead a recruiter to assume you live out of town (relocating employees is something employers are trying to avoid in the tight-budgeted economy), and missing college beginning and end dates can raise the question of exactly how long it took you to graduate with a bachelor's degree.
Other "omission" errors include abbreviating school names to only initials, which Polachi says can seem sloppy or even lazy while Arms says they can be misleading. "For example, I went to MSU," he says, "and while to me that means Montclair State University, it could also be Michigan State, Mississippi State or any number of other schools." Omissions like these can make you look like a sneak and or just down right lazy to potential employers.
Leaving things out may be a major no-no, but the experts agree nonetheless, that when it comes to resumes, shorter is sweeter.
"You're never going to hear a hiring manager say to someone, 'look, on the third page here, that's where he's really qualified!'" says Polachi, whose firm recruits top-level executives in the tech, clean tech and venture capital sectors. "A resume should be one page," he says, "I want the alpha and the omega, no one should hear about your little league coaching experience unless you're applying for a little league coaching job."
Polachi's advice for resume builders is to allot the most space to your most recent and hopefully most relevant job. "Sure I want to know you've been employed before that," he says, "but the details are less important."
As candidates add jobs to their resumes, older items may need to be eliminated. Arms advises cutting the least impressive items first. Then, if you still need to make more space, remove any items that aren't specifically applicable to the job to which you are applying. A resume can--and should--be tailored to the specific job.
When it comes to the aesthetics of a resume, what it looks like can be as important as what it says, especially for HR managers like Sanders where formatting was an issue.
"You have to ask yourself how your resume looks both on paper and electronically," says Arms, "and a lot of people don't think to send themselves a copy in an e-mail to test how it will open." This is crucial, he says, especially since different computers and e-mail programs handle attachments differently. As a safeguard, he says to try formatting your resume and saving it as a PDF, which should reliably open and print the same on any computer.
Polachi and Freeman say graphics on resumes are tacky and should be avoided, while Arms has noticed another rising and off-putting trend: including photos or headshots on resumes. "It's a little jarring," he says. "It's in your face and has nothing to do with your capabilities to perform a job. It says, 'If I can't stand out with the text of my employment history, then maybe my great smile will do it.' It's distasteful and aggressive, and it puts the reader on guard."
While casual Facebook-style photos may be jarring, it can be just as bad to create a resume so full of career jargon that the recruiter is put to sleep by its blandness. Arms says to watch for the overuse of "action words" like led--"led the team," "led a project," "took the lead." When used too many times, these phrases lose their meaning. And instead of describing previous employment in terms of responsibilities, all three experts stress that good resumes use more quantifiable descriptions of work. "I'm interested in the state of the company when you went into it, and the state of the company when you left," Polachi says. "I want data, budget, headcount and names."
"Anyone can be 'responsible for a team of six,'" agrees Arms, "But the important thing is, how did you make money, save money or make changes to the company through the work of that team?"
Finally, never forget that "A resume is a representation of you," Arms says. "It's a physical representation of the quality of work that [you are] capable of."
Something to keep in mind the next time you prepare to send off your resume. Before you click send, empathize with the person who's on the other end, reading it and judging you. Would you want to see Facebook snapshots of a job candidate? We thought not.
