A question I often get asked about resumes is “What are the top 3 mistakes that I see on resumes?”

1. Length

The top one is going to be length. As part of length, it’s also including in your resume things that don’t actually matter.

By this, I’m talking about extensive lists of skills that don’t actually demonstrate any examples, an extensive long paragraph about your personal summary that repeats sections explained later on, or within your experience points. Or a job description that has a range of statements that are repeated, or that aren’t results or achievements or they’re just extremely obvious and are a given in relation to your job role. For example, if you were doing a customer service role and you are handling a cashier, you don’t need to write down that you take cash payments, because that’s part of the understanding of what a customer service role includes.

In terms of length, any time your resume is more than 2 pages it is very unlikely to be read.

The scan of a resume by a professional recruiter, often will take about 7 to 10 seconds max and that would be generous. What they are looking at a couple of the key job titles and a couple of the key dates, just to see if they want to read even further.

The moment that goes on to 2 or 3 pages, the ability for them to scan and actually have that in depth understanding is going to be a lot harder.

I recommend that most people’s resume could actually get down to one page and still be powerful.

I have an example here of a resume that was 3 pages that after a resume review, we were able to cut it down to one page.

2. Putting your role rather than results in the job description

The next mistake is putting your role or putting what you do, as opposed to the results that you achieved. What are some of the results that you actually achieved? What are some examples and quantified data you can put down instead?

Here’s an example: In this resume, a customer service team member outlines all their tasks:

• Offers face-to-face and over the phone advice to customers on the store’s products
• Manages to up-sell products by approximately 20% by promoting offers and specials
• Liaises with supervisor on day-to-day operations and team members
• Handles customer payments
• Replenishes stock
• Provides exceptional customer service

One thing that was great here is that there was the 20% up-sell rate by promoting offers and specials – which is an achievement and quantified.

I would guess that there’s a measure within the store that tracks that. There’s a lot there that could be shortened by removing the line-by-line dot point formatting.

What we ended up getting to, after the resume review, was: “I serve between 200 and 500 customers a day. Achieving a 20% up-sell rate through promoting offers. Along with a team of 2 to 4 other staff to manage all retail operations.”

In this section, it has gone from 6 dot points with a lot of fluff or assumed knowledge to 2 lines. I’ve now got a sense of the customer volume and how many people you are serving a day. What your up-sell rate is now makes sense because there’s a base of 200 to 300 customers at least, making it 40 people being up-sold each day at minimum. I now have a sense that you are a part of a team with 2 to 4 other staff that you work with. This gives me a sense of a whole range of different things.

Now, anytime that you want to add detail and get rid of the fluff – I would ask myself; What the size of the project is? How broad it is? How do I get a sense of complexity? By getting curious about that, you will make your resume more powerful.

3. Not proofreading your resume

The final mistake is not proof reading your resume. Often, the things that I see that make me look at this problem more is, if someone says they are “extremely good at Microsoft Word” or that they have “high attention to detail” – part of me gets excited to see if they actually do because often times they don’t.

So here’s a range of different things to proofread:

• As you scan your resume, you want everything to be in line. This includes edges, margins and different bullet points. The key thing here is consistency. You may have bullet points that are slightly off, but if all of the dot points are slightly off and aligned, that’s perfectly fine.
• You want all your formatting to be the same. If you have a company name, then a role position title and they are formatted separately – that should be consistent throughout the entire resume.
• You want to make sure that your contact number and email address are really clear. It should be up the front and easy to read.
• Check for bad grammar and spelling errors. The moment I see any bad grammar or spelling errors, I start to imagine if this is the type of work that you might be putting forward.

To proofread, have someone look at it for you and have someone edit it – just like with most proofreading. If you were putting something together for a piece of writing that you are doing, the less words is often better. This will also help you to get from pages to two pages to one.

Try and see if you can find a way to say the same thing in fewer words with more impact.

To sum up the top 3 mistakes are:

1. Length, and having things which aren’t actually necessary. Try and get it down to one page or 2 pages at the max.
2. Putting your role and description, as opposed to your results and achievements.
3. Finally, not proof reading!