-
Illogical,
unfocused, sloppy or silly formats. Formats should be orderly,
standardized, practical and symmetrical.
-
Formats which
are too artistic with multiple fonts, borders, boxes, graphics, and
other fluff, often used to hide lack of experience. It is ill-advised
to think that fancy design will camouflage absence of professional
wording and content.
-
Byte-heavy
imbedded pictures, photographs or URL links.
-
Spelling
errors, typos and poor grammar, syntax and punctuation.
-
Laughably
trying too hard to sound sophisticated by using words improperly and
aggrandizing job titles and descriptions.
-
Outright lying
and deception with phony dates, claiming diplomas, degrees and other
education not actually possessed, inflating importance of job through
misleading titles, and fictitious employment.
-
Objectives
which are too general and therefore tell the reader nothing.
-
Introductions
which are meaningless and just serve to fill space.
-
Not listing
credentials, licenses, etc. specific to the objective.
-
Too many pages
because of repetitious job descriptions.
-
Dense
paragraphs which are too long, redundant and rambling; no bullet-points.
-
Functional
resumes improperly used when chronological style is more appropriate and
vice versa.
-
Use of
personal pronouns and predicate adjectives such as I, me, we, mine,
our.
-
Important
information hidden too far down rather than listed at the beginning.
-
Including
personal information that is not relevant to job or sounds sophomoric.
-
Unexplainable
gaps in employment or listing every single job even if only two weeks in
duration.
-
Employment
history longer than 10-12 years.
-
Dates which
are inaccurate, missing or too broad.
-
Inaccurate or
missing contact information.
-
Omitting names
of employers and type of industry, product or service experience.
Substituting industry for actual name of employer.
-
Unprofessional
e-mail addresses.
-
Electronic
transmission sent as PDF files and zip files, rather than Word Doc
attachments.
