There are certain things that have no place on your resume. Some of these things were mentioned earlier, but are worth mentioning again. One common mistake found on resumes is the word “resume.” Including that word as a heading on your resume does not add anything to the resume, because virtually anyone in the business or professional world can recognize a resume on sight. The same is true for the headings Vita, C.V., or Curriculum Vita.
Perhaps the most common problem with resumes, or the most common reason why a resume will screen you out of a possible job, is the presence of errors, such as typos, misspellings, or grammatical mistakes. A resume may contain only a few hundred words. Given that fact, you cannot afford to have any of those words convey to an employer that you are anything but fully competent.
Most word processors can help you with words that you might misspell. The problem with relying on computers alone to “proofread” your resume is that the computer doesn’t know what you meant to type. This is a problem when you use the wrong word or verb tense, or when you type a word incorrectly, but where the mistyped word is a different word spelled correctly. With this in mind, and for all of the reasons mentioned in this section, you should have a friend or friends read your resume from the viewpoint of the prospective employer.
Another thing that should be absent from your resume is anything that is false or misleading. “Padding” your resume with exaggerations, half-truths, or outright falsehoods may give you a short-term advantage; however, if the truth is uncovered in the job interview, you will forfeit that advantage, and more. If the truth is uncovered after you have started with the employer, you may lose your job, and then you’ll have a potentially dangerous reference out there.
Another mistake made on resumes is to include information of a personal nature. As was mentioned earlier, including information on health, marital status, height, weight, etc. is not advisable. Including such information is as likely to rule you out of a job as it is to give you an advantage. And this information is even more likely to take up valuable room that you could have used for other, more pertinent information.
It is also advisable to exclude salary history or requirements. This topic is best discussed face-to-face after an actual job offer. See Chapter 11 for more information on salary negotiations.
Scannable Resumes
One of the recent changes to the art of resume writing has been the advent of the
computer scanner. Like a copier, a scanner duplicates the image found on a piece
of paper. Rather than reproducing the image on paper, however, the scanner makes
a digital reproduction, which is then examined by an Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) program that translates the image into the words that it recognizes from
the page. This technology has been of great value to major employers like IBM,
which receives up to two million unsolicited resumes a year. By using this scanning
and conversion technology, an employer can convert the paper resume to a text
file, which it can then search electronically to identify every resume on file that
contains the word “forklift” or “C++” or “landscaping.”
To that end, entire books have been written to explain how to best take advantage of this new technology and avoid the pitfalls it introduces. For example, you should avoid special formatting such as underlined words, italics, script fonts, etc., because the formatting may confuse the computer and your word may be lost. As the OCR technology continues to improve, however, these problems will likely disappear. Another strategy for writing a scannable resume is to focus more on the nouns in your resume than on the verbs. Words like “PowerPoint” or “forklift” or “cyclotron” are more useful to someone who is doing a text search than are words like “operated,” “designed,” or “organized.”
As we will discuss in Chapter 7, almost every job-search method has a place in your job-search master plan. To ignore the recommendations for writing a scannable resume, and then to submit it to an HR department where it is likely to be scanned, is to risk making that resume less likely to help you. On the other hand, you should not rely too heavily on any job-search method in which you or your resume will be treated as impersonally as being digitized and relegated to some huge database somewhere.
The key to most successful job searches is to have the opportunity to discuss your candidacy with an individual who has the responsibility of deciding who will be hired. The best way to make that happen is to get that individual to actually read your resume at some point, preferably after speaking to a mutual acquaintance.