You won't find a more appropriate philosophy once you begin to develop your resume. Like the famous line from Dragnet, "Just the facts," a resume should provide a snapshot of your background and education, not a detailed description telling how you reached your accomplishments.
The only objective of a resume should be to attract the attention of a potential employer and secure a personal interview.
MISCONCEPTION: A resume should be a complete summary of all your qualifications and employers during the past thirty years.
REALITY: Only highlights of your most recent employment history have real value to potential employers.
With this in mind, our next step will not be a dissertation focusing on the correct way to construct a resume. Instead, we will counsel you through the three most significant errors that candidates make on their resumes:
- Lengthy resumes
- Unclear listings of education and work experience
- Too much personal information
The single greatest factor that results in your typical "Dear John" rejection letter has nothing to do with your education, qualifications, or experience. The most damaging action that can provide that immediate knockout punch is a lengthy resume.
Resumes should be limited to two pages even if you've held fifteen positions of increasing responsibility over thirty years. Why the concern with length? First, lengthy resumes are a surefire tip-off to your age. If you are in your late fifties or early sixties but look and act forty, you want the opportunity to get in front of a potential employer to show off your youthful outlook and appearance.
Forget all the EEO laws and preaching about hiring older workers. Many employers still shy away from anyone over fifty because there's a significant pool of younger, qualified candidates who don't command high salaries.
MISCONCEPTION: Your resume is the best sales tool available in the quest to get a job.
REALITY: The only objective of a resume is to attract attention. Selling yourself should be left for the personal interview.
Second, lengthy resumes are difficult to handle and track when they have to be reproduced or faxed. For example, in response to an employment ad, we received a seven-page resume from a senior executive in a food-processing company. Since a great sense of urgency existed, my instructions were to fax all appropriate resumes to my client immediately. To fax the seven-pager, we had to remove the staple, and we continually found ourselves mixing up the pages with other resumes that only had one or two pages. Finally, in frustration, my assistant questioned the necessity of sending the discourse since our fax could only feed ten sheets for each transmission. Her comment: "If we eliminate this short story, I will only have to make one transmission."
After carefully thinking about it and reviewing the resume again, this candidate didn't survive the cut. With the seven-page resume, it was easy to pinpoint at least a few disqualifying factors because there was so much information to choose from. If it takes more than two pages to list your credentials, you are setting yourself up for failure.
The rule is simple. If it takes more than one stamp to mail your resume, you're overselling on first contact.
Error 2: Unclear Listings of Education and Work Experience
EDUCATION
Incorrectly listing education credentials creates confusion and raises questions about the validity of your degree. It is critical that you include your specific degree and year of graduation when listing colleges or universities.
MISCONCEPTION: The more colleges you list, the better your chances of impressing a potential employer.
REALITY: Listing every course you took and college you attended can create the perception that you have a difficult time completing what you start.
Without this important information, most recruiters and personnel people will make the assumption that you did not earn a degree. Examine the following listing from a resume.
MISCONCEPTION: If you had great grades in college, this fact will impress potential employers even if you graduated twenty years ago.
REALITY: The further along in years, the less important is your actual performance in college. Save that space for more important business accomplishments.
However, if specific questions are asked about your education on an application or during an interview, you must be open and honest about your sojourn.
Also, if you think your age will hinder your chances of getting a job, take a chance by only listing the college and the degree, leaving off the year you graduated. This may open a door that would have otherwise been closed by your age.
Limit the education section to critical information. Who really cares if you graduated with high honors twenty-five years ago? The longer you are out of school, the less important the specifics of your performance in the classroom. Stressing academics can take away valuable space that should be dedicated to your work history and experience.
Finally, if you do not have a degree, it may be best to leave the EDUCATION heading off your resume. This action focuses the employer's attention on positives such as your accomplishments while neutralizing the fact that you may not have a formal education.
WORK EXPERIENCE
Because of mergers and acquisitions, many job hunters have trouble developing work history descriptions. It is highly possible for someone to hold the same position for ten years while having four different employers who bought the company during that period. Without an explanation, that track record could mislead the reader into thinking, "This person is a job hopper."
MISCONCEPTION: The best way to attract attention is to include the unique approaches you've used to accomplish an objective.
REALITY: Your resume should only include what you have done, not how you did it. Too much detail can highlight contrasting management styles.
Also, when smaller companies are purchased by bigger ones, titles often change. Therefore, a vice-president in a $50M company might receive the new title of general manager in a $100M division of a larger corporation but still have the same responsibilities. Same job, different title.
Another point of contention is supplying irrelevant and confusing information in your work history. If you were to read the resume of a notable athlete like Bo Jackson, you would admire a list of his awards and accomplishments, for example, Rookie of the Year, MVP, and leading rusher. What you would not see is a play-by-play summary describing how he reached these pinnacles. That would take a book, and, in fact, it did.
MISCONCEPTION: Providing detailed personal information on the resume can be a good hook to explore common grounds with a potential employer.
REALITY: By including too much personal information, you run the risk of hitting a sore spot in the reader's own life.
List your accomplishments but hold back on the HOWs. Save them for the interview.
Error 3: Too Much Personal Information
How do you think the following write-up under the heading of PERSONAL INFORMATION would be received by an individual who recently went through a difficult divorce?
Happily married to a wonderful wife with three lovely children.
This description is commonplace. Sure, you should be proud of a happy and stable home life, but displaying this information to somebody on the opposite end of the spectrum could be disastrous. If a solid home front is a critical job requirement, the issue will come up soon enough in an interview.
The same scenario holds true if you belong to certain organizations, whether religious, political, or professional. A chauvinistic manager who reads "Regional director for the National Organization of Women (NOW)" might get intimidated and pass you by.
Again, the safest approach is to stick to the facts and surgically remove any information that could be misinterpreted by a reviewer. You may wish to forgo the personal section in favor of devoting more space to your work history and accomplishments.
Finally, if you've been a job hopper who's held fifteen jobs in the past twenty years, there are two recommendations. First, forget using a resume and concentrate on developing a great letter of introduction that could get you in the door. Like colleges that have minimum entrance requirements on SAT scores, many employers will disqualify candidates on work histories alone. Second, if you have problems securing and keeping employment in a specific field, such as sales or accounting, maybe it's time to try your hand at another discipline.
