Don’t Make These Mistakes in Your Resume and Cover Letter
When you’re competing in the job market, you don’t necessarily need to be the best qualified, you need to LOOK like the best qualified, so you can prove it in the interview. Errors in your resume and cover letter can automatically disqualify you before Human Resources has considered your qualifications. (This happened to a friend of mine: she was at the interview when they spotted a spelling error on the resume, and that was the end of the interview.)
This is what you need to know.
1. Have people you trust review your resume and cover letter for typos, misspellings, and other errors. Don’t rely on spell check or other computer programs to detect everything, because they won’t.
2. When capitalizing words, remember, only capitalize proper nouns (Paris, Microsoft, Stratocaster, as opposed to city, software, electric guitar), sentence starts, and titles (but not short or prepositions). /an unless they are the first word
Examples: A Walk to Remember, A Tale of Two Cities, The Spring, When in Rome, Sleepless in Seattle, Of Mice and Men
3. Make sure your bullet points “match.”
For example
- Managed budgets up to $100K
- supervised up to 50 staff members
Nope
- Managed budgets up to $100K
- supervision of up to 50 officials.
Since “drive” is a past tense verb, all first words must be past tense verbs. “Supervision” is a noun and therefore does not agree. Also note the period at the end of the last bullet point. It’s up to you if you choose to put periods at the end of your bullet points, however choose one and keep it throughout the resume. Also, bullet points don’t have to be full sentences. And be careful with the number of bullet points. If you only have one or two, make it a normal sentence without bullet points. If you have more than five, try to match a pair and remove extra words. Target three to five.
3. Use a professional email address, something that reflects your name. Skip “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. “[email protected], or jdoe, or jane.doe27 (if there are a lot of Jane Doe-type addresses). Use that address for everything work-related.
4. Do not include anything on your resume that indicates something that could be used to illegally discriminate: age (so if you graduated from college in 1969, you may want to omit the date), race, ethnicity (member of the Association Italian American). association), sexual orientation or disability.
5. Do not put your references on your resume (for your privacy). You don’t even need to include the line “References available upon request.” It’s superfluous – everyone has references and employers are already planning to ask for them once they interview you.