Bookmark and Share
You are here: Home / Blog / Resume Writing

Resume Writing: Things to Avoid

November 30, 2009 By 2 Comments

If you’re updating your resume, or even starting a new one, you know there are certain elements to include. However, keep in mind that there are also some things that need to be left out.

When writing your resume, tell the truth. Though it’s tempting to want to stretch the truth, lying is a big no-no in resumes. Most Human Resources departments will do background checks with former employers and false information on a resume will not only ruin your credibility, but it will probably cost you the job. Never list your hobbies on your resume. Professional associations and memberships should be listed, but keep it to work related items not what you enjoy doing in your free time. Also, contrary to what some might think, you do not need to list every employer you’ve ever had. People with a lot of professional experience can begin to remove older positions from their resume, especially if they aren’t relevant to your career now and the jobs to which you are applying. Finally, leave the fancy font and designs off your resume. Keep it simple, professional, and easy to read.

Making sure you include all of your important work experience is vital to a successful resume. Keeping the extraneous elements off it is just as important. Make sure to avoid unnecessary information to ensure an effective resume.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With:

Are Resume Services Tax Deductible?

September 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If you are debating having your resume professionally rewritten you’ll be pleased to learn that the fee for such services may be tax deductible.  Expenses may be itemized on Schedule A and according to IRS Publication 529, resume services are a qualifying job search expense.

However, in order to deduct expenses, there are three conditions which must apply to your job search.

1.    You must be looking for a new job in your same occupation. If you are looking to change careers, your job search will not qualify for deductions.
2.    There must not be a “substantial” break in your employment.  The IRS does not define “substantial”, so be sure to find out the details of this one if you think it may apply to your current situation.
3.    You have previously held another job – or in other words, this can’t be your first job search.

But, if you meet the three criteria above, there are numerous job related expenses that you may be able to deduct.  Actually, most expenses relating to your resume are deductible.  The big ones like resume writing services and distributions even down to the postage used to send out your resume.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

A Good Resume for Every Occasion

August 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

You may have already heard the good resume advice that says it is critical to tailor your resume to each job you apply on. However, this is not necessarily true. Better advice is to create several different resumes for different types of jobs. The reason you cannot use the same resume everywhere is because you want to emphasize different things for different types of jobs. However, tailoring your resume for every single job is an ineffective use of your job search time.

If you are looking for a management position, you will want to point out every occasion when you were in charge of others or took responsibility. However, if you are looking for a customer service job, you may want to focus on your past experience dealing with people. If you are looking for something that you have no paid experience doing, you may want to create a resume that focuses on your volunteer work or your education.

By creating several different resumes, you will be able to save yourself a great deal of time and effort. You can tailor cover letters to specific jobs. That is quite sufficient for your job search. Customized cover letters are perfectly suited to your job search and are a good use of the time you have dedicated to finding a new job.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

Your Resume – An Employer’s First Impression of You

July 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Before a prospective employer ever gets to shake your hand they will already have formed somewhat of an opinion about you. How? By looking at you is your resume.

A resume has to tell this prospective employer why they should call you and grant you the opportunity to meet with them for the chance of gaining employment. Ah, and you thought it was just to tell where you went to school and what jobs you’ve held in the past. Because your resume will be a direct reflection of you, make sure that it is clean, symmetric, and to the point.

Remember that along with your resume, the prospective employer will be viewing many others so yours must stand out. I don’t mean to put it on pink card stock or even to dress it in a binder, but there should be a certain amount of flare to it. Try using some, but not tons of, italics, bold, bullet points, and other font magic to dress your resume up.

Make sure that you are giving an accurate description of yourself, but don’t write a book. Too much information will have them thinking you are a blow-hard that is full yourself, not good. A good rule of thumb is keeping each section of writing to six lines, or less. I could personally write about six pages of information about the college I attended, but my perspective employer isn’t really going to care about who my favorite professor was and where I ate my lunch.

Most importantly, you need to make sure there are no grammatical or spelling errors in your resume. If you are like I am with spelling, there will be plenty of corrections that will need to be made. Use your spell checker, that’s what it is there for!

Getting your foot in the door at the workplace of your dreams is sometimes a very difficult task. This can be made just a bit easier by ensuring that your resume is not only worthy of you, but also worthy of being read in the first place.

Jason Kay is a professional resume writer and regular contributor to JobGoRound.com, which provides job search tips, interview advice, and resume service reviews.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

Top 5 Professional Resume Services

June 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

As you already know, resumes are the key that unlock the door to the job of your dreams – the job that will provide a secure financial future for you and your family. Whether you are still young and single or married with children, a great job can provide you with the resources to achieve your goals. The hardest part is landing that great job. Although you may have the required education and experience, there is always going to be someone out there who has more – more education, more experience, and more awards.

There are companies out there who can help you get your foot in the door by helping you create a killer resume. These companies are known as professional resume services and there are many online which you can choose from. Some of the most popular professional resume services include:

Although you are bound to find less-known professional resume service providers who will offer this service for next to nothing, it is more important to select a company or individual provider who can boast real results. After all, when it comes to your career, you don’t want to miss out on an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because you were trying to skimp around the edges and keep your costs down.  All of these professional resume writing services have been highly rated by former customers of the services. JobGoRound.com maintains the resume writing service reviews.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

Stand Out From the Crowd with a Video Resume

May 7, 2009 By 2 Comments

What is one way to stand out to an employer? By uploading a video resume of yourself. A video resume is basically where you give the employer all of the information he would normally get from a paper resume – and then some – on video tape. You then send your video resume off to the employer, who will watch it and will (hopefully) be won over by your wit and personality.

There are many reasons why a video resume is a good idea, some of which include:

  1. A video resume gives you a chance to showcase your personality and/or people skills, so that you can convince the employer that these traits will make you an asset to the company.
  2. A video resume gives you the chance to show the employer how well you perform while under pressure, a quality that many employers look for in their potential employees.
  3. A video resume gives you a forum to present your case and the space needed to elaborate on your special skills, education, and experience. You can essentially talk to the employer and give him reason after reason why he should choose you – something you can’t do with a paper resume
  4. A video resume allows you to stand out from the crowd and get noticed right away. This benefit is a very important one in a corporate world where employers are inundated with hundreds of resumes for one open position and where a majority of paper resumes are tossed aside when they fail to impress the employer within the first few sentences.

The idea behind a video resume is to show the employer a little bit of who you are and convince him that you are the perfect candidate for the job, instead of relying on a lifeless paper resume to do the job for you. In the end, the goal of a video resume is to persuade the employer into scheduling an interview using this unique approach, when otherwise your resume may not have made it much further than the trash bin.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

9 Immediate Fantastic Fixes to Your Resume – Continued

May 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

Now that you have had a chance to implement the first 5 fantastic fixes from my last post, here are the remaining four:

6. If you are putting your resume online, make sure you use relevant keywords and incorporate them effectively. Placement of your keywords can be just as important as which keywords you use. This will make it easier for employers and recruiters to find you on job search websites.

7. Use the bold, italic, and underline functions to make important items stand out and allow employers and recruiters to easily scan your document. Often times a manager only has about 30 seconds to devote to each resume, so it is important that it is very easy to skim, without missing critical information.

8. Highlight your most important accomplishments in a special section at the top of your resume. Because of the very short amount of time that managers have to dedicate to each resume, it is important to summarize your most relevant experience and accomplishments right from the get-go.

9. Adjust font and spacing to fill the pages of your resume. Having blank space on your resume, even if it isn’t the first page, says to the employer “I can’t think of anything else to say about myself”. Full pages say “I have a lot more to say, but ran out of room”.

One of the most important things to remember is that length is not the be-all-end-all of resume preparation. Even if you don’t have much experience to highlight, being too wordy, repetitious, or including irrelevant information just to fill space can backfire on you. It is best to keep your resume short, concise, and to the point, even if that means you have to make major changes to your font and spacing in order to fill a page. Remember: summary style over story style.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

9 Immediate Fantastic Fixes to Your Resume

May 2, 2009 By 2 Comments

Having a well-written, professional looking resume is important to job search success. Even though you may think you know what it takes to create a winning resume, there are important elements that are easy to miss when you are preparing your resume, especially if you are applying for your first post-college job or internship. The following 9 quick fixes will help give your resume the edge it needs to stand out from the crowd.

  1. Make sure your resume has a sales element. It is important that you treat yourself as a product and your resume as a sales letter to sell that product, in order to make it has persuasive as possible.
  2. Only mention past experience and accomplishments that are relevant to the position that your are applying for.
  3. Use bullet points to help make your resume easy to skim while getting across important points, but don’t overdo it. Having too many bullet points will turn your resume into nothing more than a grocery list that lacks substance.
  4. Make sure your contact information is large and legible. Many resume templates use tiny font which can be difficult for managers and recruiters to read. If you use a resume template, make sure to adjust the font on your contact information if necessary.
  5. Have someone else proofread your resume to avoid typos. As even top notch writers know, your own work can be the toughest to check for small typos because your brain knows what is “supposed” to be there. If you don’t have anyone who can look it over for you, the next best idea is to walk away from it for a few hours and proofread it again with ‘fresh eyes’. The worst time to proofread your resume is right after you’ve written it, as that is when you are most likely to miss simple errors.

These first 5 fixes will get you started. Next post: the remaining 4 fantastic fixes that will help give your resume more appeal.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

Three Things to Avoid In Your Resume

March 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A resume is a brief and persuasive summary of your skills and professional accomplishments. Your resume is supposed to be your ‘advert’ to the potential buyers of your services (the employers) and it is important that you ensure that it is flawless, or near flawless if you don’t believe in perfectionism. Remember, the presentation of your resume is likely to influence your potential employer, even before they get to read its contents. While there are a number of important things you should include in your resume, which are well known to almost everyone, there is also a number of things that you must avoid in your resume – and these are surprisingly unknown to many jobseekers.

1.    Typos: It might seem too obvious to state, but a surprisingly big number of resumes have more than one typo in them. Typos (in anything) are seen as a sign of carelessness, and hardly any employer is likely to be drawn to a potential employee who is careless enough to have typos on their resume, of all places.

2.    Clutter: You have to make a prudent choice on what to include and what not to include in your resume. Remember, the document is meant to be a persuasive summary of your skills. You therefore don’t need to mention every seminar or symposium you attended – unless it gives you an edge in the particular job you are applying for. The key to deciding what to include and what to leave out is relevance. For every detail you are considering, you need to ask yourself – is this element relevant to the job I am looking to apply?

3.    Too much color: When it comes to color and resumes – the adage that simplicity is genius can never be truer. Many people fret too much about the color schemes to use for their resume, and some end up using too much color, which can be choking and repulsive. But experience has shown that as far as resumes go, you can never go wrong with the traditional black and white.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,

Resume Don’ts

March 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Your resume is often the first contact that an employer has of you. The impression given on paper can earn you further consideration or it may also earn your resume a quick trip to the trash can. Many companies are so bombarded with resumes that any small detail could cause yours to get rejected. Below are the things not to include, so your resume stays in the right stack.

  • Do not give personal details like marital status, age and if you have children.
  • Do not provide physical information about yourself, such as weight, height or whether or not you have a physical disability.
  • Do not include a photograph of yourself unless you are asked to do so by the company you are applying to.
  • Do not mention how hard it is to find a job.
  • Avoid mentioning anything negative, including how tough you have had it in life.
  • Do not joke.
  • Make no mention of family members or friends.
  • Don’t disclose how much you made in past jobs, unless specifically required to do so.
  • Never handwrite a resume.

Keep a resume as brief as possible by sticking to the facts, relevant information and avoiding the resume don’ts. This will help to ensure your resume gets a second look.

Filed Under: Resume Writing Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »
About | Contact | Terms | Privacy | Sitemap | Forum | Resources | Coupons | Resume Service Reviews | Resume Distribution