5 reasons your resume sucks (and how to make it better)

When I put out a hiring notice a little while ago, I was flooded with resumes. Now, like any busi­ness owner, I’m both hard­working and lazy, so I quickly devel­oped a short­hand to help me sift through all the appli­cants. In short: if I could find a good reason to throw your resume out, it was gone.

In this charming eco­nomic cli­mate, if you’re looking for a new job, it may be time to take a good hard look at your own resume, and ensure that you’re not com­mit­ting any of these car­dinal sins.

1. It isn’t proofread.

A resume that’s full of gram­mat­ical and spelling errors just screams “Hi! I’m under­e­d­u­cated and unpro­fes­sional, and you’d be embar­rassed to have me rep­re­senting your com­pany!” Learn how to use apos­tro­phes cor­rectly, run your text through a spellcheck, and have a friend look over your resume before sending it out. Better yet, have as many friends as you can pos­sibly charm, bribe, or black­mail to have a look at it—or have a pro­fes­sional write it for you.

2. It’s hard to read.

Most people won’t be reading your resume, they’ll be skim­ming it. You want to make it as easy as pos­sible for them to absorb the infor­ma­tion. Just say no to long blocks of text, and make use of sec­tion headers and con­sis­tent type styles for dif­ferent pieces of infor­ma­tion (job titles, com­pany names, and dates should all have dif­ferent type styles) to create a hier­archy of infor­ma­tion that’s easy to read. Use a font size that’s large enough to be read­able, and make sure lines of text aren’t span­ning the entire page (for optimum leg­i­bility, lines of type should be between 50 and 70 characters.)

3. You’re using a generic Word template.

If your resume looks the same as twenty other resumes in the pile, you’re already at a dis­ad­van­tage. Everyone judges a book by its cover, and you want to be War & Peace, not a Danielle Steele novel. (That said, you prob­ably want to keep your page count a little less than War & Peace‘s. Maybe The Meta­mor­phasis, instead.)

4. You’re sending a .doc file.

Why is it still common to do this? Word files can con­tain macros, which can give your com­puter viruses. That’s bad—the last thing you want to do is give the hiring man­ager at the com­pany of your dreams a virus. Word files also don’t retain their for­mat­ting very well—they’ll look dif­ferent in dif­ferent ver­sions of Word. When people send me a .doc, I open it with a basic text editor, which destroys pretty much all for­mat­ting, but takes a teeny frac­tion of the time to load on my com­puter. Use a pdf instead, which will look the same to everyone. (You can export a Word file to pdf easily.)

5. It isn’t relevant

If you worked at McDonald’s six years ago and are now applying for a posi­tion at an accounting firm, they’re not going to care about the cus­tomer ser­vice and french-fry-handling skills you picked up there. It’s also unlikely that they care what you do in your spare time, unless the hiring man­ager is also a taxi­dermy enthusiast—but unless you know this in advance, keep the hob­bies off the resume. Keep it relevant.

6. Your cover letter shows no effort

Find out who will be reading your resume, and address him by name. We’re all crazy ego­ma­niacs, so we like this. Don’t use “To whom it may con­cern”, ever. Show that you know some­thing about the com­pany, and that you’re not just firing off a form letter at random. I once received an appli­ca­tion from a person who reg­u­larly posted his cover letter as a Kijiji ad, and it was a touch insulting. Com­pare your skills and exper­tise to those out­lined in the job posting and you’ll be essen­tially telling them exactly what they want, and that you have it.

In short, what you want to do is make sure that your resume is both well-written and well-designed, and that it rep­re­sents you to the absolute best of its ability. If you’re having trouble doing this your­self, I’ve teamed up with Natalie Joan to offer a spe­cial deal: have a resume designed by me, and written by her, and save 10% off both ser­vices! For all the details, check it out here.

Good luck with the job hunt!