1. THE OVERLONG RESUME
Winston Churchill was once complimented on a speech that lasted one hour. He was asked how long it took to write it. He replied that it took two hours. "Amazing," the interviewer interjected. "Not really," said Sir Winston. "I could have written a half-hour speech if I'd had four hours to write it." If you are long-winded in your resume, your prospective boss must assume you will be long-winded at the weekly executive committee meeting. Unless you are in your fifties with a career involving a great many job changes, two pages should suffice-at the outside, three pages. Resumes as long as five and six pages are bore. Almost no prospective boss will read beyond page two or three, but will throw down your resume in disgust and move on to the next one. Worse still, he may not read it all, thinking to himself: "If he can't summarize his own experience, how can he summarize our key business problems?"
2. THE OVER DETAILED RESUME
One reason resumes sometimes get too long is because they are too detailed. A resume that is over detailed is, in point of fact, insulting because it assumes the prospective boss who read it has little or no understanding of the scope of the job to be filled. If you are applying for a job as a plant manager, you shouldn't need to describe every piece of equipment that you've ever dealt with. It's the scope of your operation that is going to be evaluated: how many people you worked with, what kind of industries the plants you managed were in. Give your prospective boss credit for being able to realize the details of your current operation and sell him on the breadth of your experience.
What kind of people write over detailed resumes? As a prospective employer you might well assume that they are involved with minutiae, probably unable to communicate broad, basic generalizations. When you prepare your own resume, make sure your background is simple and broad-brush. Don't be thought of as thinking small, or you many never have the opportunity to think big.
3. THE IRRELEVANT-FIRST RESUME
As a rule of thumb, your most recent experience is ten times more important to your prospective boss than your experience five years ago. Not only should you talk first about it, you should talk most about it too. As a guide, if you've held four jobs, you might well devote 40 percent of your resume to your current job, 30 percent to the previous job, 20 percent to the job prior to that one, and 10 percent to the one before that. Only in exceptional circumstances should you vary that format. The obvious exception is the instance in which you desire to secure a job in a position more similar to your previous job than to your current one.
4. THE BURIED-TREASURE RESUME
In recent years a number of resume counselors have suggested that "accomplishments" be included in resumes. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, these counselors haven't made any firm recommendation as to how to include accomplishments in the resume itself. Thus, all too often I read resumes with accomplishments literally squeezed in at the ends of paragraphs, hidden from all but the most persevering reader. Unfortunately, the prospective employer may never discover them. If he skims your resume, his reaction may well be that the resume is from a mediocre candidate. Had you punched home your worth by putting the same information in a separate and visible paragraph, the prospective employer might have had a vastly more positive reaction. Because few prospective bosses will persevere, it will pay you to separate your worth points from your brief job description so that both stand out.
5. THE MAKE-DO RESUME
The number of people who have the audacity (or stupidity) to send last year's resume for this year's job is mind-boggling. This fault is not limited to neophyte job-seekers, either. I have received numerous resumes from senior executives, prepared for a distant time in the past and supplemented with an addendum or over riding letter. The executive receiving such a resume has to question the sincerity of the job-seeker in applying for the position. It costs no more than $20 to have a resume updated. If you really mean business, surely it's worth that much to turn out a current selling sheet about yourself.
Last year's resume with addendum attached is not the only kind of make-do resume. Another is the resume written originally to go after a particular job, such as engineer, but sent out in response to ads for a totally different kind of position, such as production supervisor. Frequently its author underlines the one or two relevant paragraphs in the otherwise non-relevant background, lest they be overlooked. The attitude of prospective bosses to such make-do resumes is likely to be this: If the candidate in question really wanted to be considered seriously, why didn't he rewrite his resume, stressing his experience, however limited, in the field where he is now applying for a job? Tidbits, even underlined, are not enough!
6. THE GLAMOUR PUSS RESUME
It is prepared by a one-flight-up resume-writing firm. You can spot this kind of resume a mile away. It may have a gold or blue border. It may be printed in maroon or green ink. It may use a very bold IBM typeface. It may be printed on a stock so stiff it can't be folded. Anything to stand out. And it does-as a resume that was not written by you. Your prospective boss is interested in what you have done-not anyone else. And that includes the ability to organize your career in a meaningful way to him. If you can't write your own resume, why should your prospective boss expect you to be able to write an effective two-page summation of a business problem? And just as important, if you are too lazy to write your own resume, just how energetic will you be on the job?
