How to Avoid Resume Bloopers

By STANLEY AND JONATHAN WYNETT

From the National Business Employment Weekly

In boxing, even heavy-weights rarely score a knockout with a single blow to their opponent’s chin. More often the knockout results from an accumulation of previous blows.

The same is true with resumes. Those factors that don’t K.O. a resume with a single blow nevertheless weaken it, and a weak resume isn’t what employers are standing in line to read. If you want to gain a multitude of readers, heed this practical advice. It’ll help prevent unwitting bloopers from creeping into your resume and rendering it untouchable.

Misspelled Words

Of all deaths, the most pointless result from carelessness with spelling, grammar and choice of words. Without exception, every recruiter and hiring manager we’ve interviewed mentioned misspellings, misused words and grammatical mistakes as irreversible and almost always fatal flaws in a resume or cover letter.

Employers simply won’t put up with an applicant who uses impaired spelling, particularly when the job seeker misspells the interviewer’s or the organization’s name. For that, there’s no forgiveness.

Misspelled or misused words reveal slipshod work habits and laziness. In your own interest, have someone else proofread your resume after you have. Mistakes often result from your haste to get out a new model. Much more common, and infinitely harder to overcome, is the next knockout factor.

Duties, Not Accomplishments

Everywhere and always, if you describe the duties you perform and don’t include your accomplishments, your resume is virtually assured of a near-death experience. This is especially true if it comes up against resumes that are packed with accomplishments.

Flexible Requirements

This knockout factor is probably most underestimated and misunderstood by job hunters. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache from false expectations if you understand flexible requirements.

Flexible requirements are desirable but not necessary to get the job. For example, most ads list the specific requirements candidates need to be hired. Often another, more elastic, qualification is also cited. Consider the words such as those highlighted in these phrases:

• knowledge of SQL helpful
• M.B.A. desirable.

In this case, the employer means these are flexible requirements. If no candidates mention the flexible requirement on their resumes, it’s simply forgotten.

But when there’s an oversupply of talent for the position, employers can find a dream candidate who meets all the specified requirements -- as well as the "plus" or "helpful." Your resume may be passed over even though you met an ad’s specific requirements but lacked the flexible ones. This is a spirit-crushing fact that you must understand and accept, but don’t let it diminish your self-confidence.

If you lack the flexible qualification but have the others, respond anyway. Consider your application a reach. What’s a reach? It’s when you lack one or more of an ad’s requirements but send in your resume with the attitude, what-have-I-got-lose? You hope employers will pay attention to your strongest skills. Reaches, like hunches, sometimes pay off.

A reminder: If you know at the start your candidacy is a reach, don’t stay home waiting for the employer to call. Unjustified optimism can lead to false hopes, which lead to a letdown.

Office Phone Numbers

Many resume writers think they’re being helpful to prospective employers by listing their office phone number on their resume. They’re wrong. Job hunters suffer not from being unavailable but from being too available.

Being too available can scare employers. They want you to be slightly unavailable, slightly out of reach, someone who values their job enough that you wouldn’t imperil it by permitting prospective employers to call you at the office. We crave that which is denied us. This is why unemployed job applicants rank lower than candidates who are working. They’re freely available, and may be willing to join anyone’s payroll. They’re required to give up nothing. The employed worker, on the other hand, must make a sacrifice to join an employer and is therefore more desirable.

When you list your office phone on your letterhead, employers ask themselves why you’re seeking work on company time. Has your company given you notice and told you to start looking? How will you handle it if your boss or a colleague is near when a hiring manager calls?

Prospective employers and executive recruiters are willing to call you at home at night -- to protect your present employment, to prevent interruptions and because the conversation might last 30 to 60 minutes if the chemistry is right.

Functional Format

Employers are as mistrustful as jailers when they see a functional format instead of the approved chronological style.

They disapprove of functional resumes because they suspect you may be applying the format to deemphasize a potential flaw or weakness, e.g., a gap between jobs or your age. Or you may use a functional format to present yourself as more of an expert than your background warrants. They also dislike functional resumes because they’re hard to follow. Spare your reader puzzlements of this sort.

Overqualified

Here’s another patch of ozone in which resumes flame out. Overqualified means you haven’t been able to get the market to pay you what you deserve for the job you’re trained for, so you’re forced to settle for what the market offers. Overqualified is also a convenient alibi for employers to hide behind if their real reason for rejecting you is illegal, e.g., your age.

In England, where there’s no law prohibiting age discrimination, classified ads regularly carry age-specific requirements, e.g., "Retail salesperson between ages 20 to 25 wanted."

How many of us with 10 to 15 years of experience respond to ads requiring only one to three years or three to five years? The requirement is a subtle form of age discrimination.

When one to three years’ experience is required in an ad, applicants should know the employer won’t consider rank beginners and isn’t interested in paying higher wages to someone with twice or three times that experience.

In the world of job hunting, moving down is harder than moving up. Employers recognize, with some justification, that individuals who work below their competency level won’t realize their true potential and enjoy the work. They won’t be committed employees.

Employers would just as soon promote someone who’ll find the work challenging. Additionally, employers wonder whether you truly want to be on their payroll. Among their concerns: Why aren’t you able to command the salary you deserve? How long would you stay with us? Won’t the work bore you?

The best advice is to contain the problem. One way is by dumbing down your resume so you don’t seem so overqualified. For instance, we advised one customer to delete his Ph.D. in chemistry when he applied for jobs as a junior chemist.

Another way to contain the problem is to keep submitting your resume as is. We surveyed 500 employers on their attitudes about job applicants and interviews. A full 30% of employers say they had no objection to hiring people for jobs they were clearly overqualified for. The employers figured that gaining mature and experienced workers at bargain prices for as long as they cared to stay was a no-brainer. So keep sending out your resume until you connect with someone in this 30%.

If interviewers have told you that you’re overqualified, maybe now is the time to repackage yourself and prepare a second resume that dumbs down your experience to the level required for available positions.

Discussing Pay

Employers often say in ads that they won’t consider your response unless you divulge salary history. Don’t fall for it. They review all the resumes they receive.

Employers put far too much time and money into composing and running ads to ignore any response. They know that many fully qualified applicants will omit salary, and they aren’t about to let a good catch slip away.

To put this theory to the test, we called more than 200 employers who ran ads in a national newspaper that asked for salary history. We asked each employer if they read all the responses they received, and 93% said yes.

You’re far more likely to be ruled out when you mention salary than when you don’t.

Being an Entrepreneur

Other candidates who often are screened out at the earliest stage of the hiring process are professionals who have been entrepreneurs. Employers distrust entrepreneurs because they’re mavericks who are extremely self-willed. They’re accustomed to giving orders, not taking them. They want to impose conditions, not submit to them as corporations require. Finally, they want no ceiling on the money they can make and to get rich fast.

There’s more. Employers wonder: Why are you coming to us? Did you fail to make it on your own? Oh, you made a lot of money, did you? Then you’re no longer driven. How can we trust the quantified achievements on your resume if you reported to yourself?

By changing a few titles and making other edits, you can disguise your entrepreneurial career. Readers can then assess your worth without your triggering a built-in bias. For instance, omit words like founder and change titles such as founder/owner to operations manager. We can’t remember an entrepreneur who failed to get interviews after making these changes.

Too Many Jobs

The final knockout factor that eliminates many applicants is citing too many jobs. Some people move from job to job, company to company, industry to industry -- all on the same resume.

Listing too many jobs earns unsatisfactory grades from employers because it shows a restlessness that no employer can satisfy, or a personality no employer cares to deal with, chronic lateness or absenteeism, or the three Ds: dishonesty, drinking and drugs. One thing you can count on: readers aren’t going to stop and ponder it. They’ll stop reading because it makes them feel uneasy.

Resumes with too many jobs can survive the first cut and become contenders. However, you need to show that you have more going for you than other candidates.

Some industries permit or don’t deplore job hopping, e.g., Wall Street and almost every area of science, computing, software and electronics.

One note: employers forgive almost anything if you’re young enough. If you’re no longer young, they withhold forgiveness. As one employer put it: "Suppose someone has changed jobs four times in eight years. That’s OK for a kid, but not for an older person."

Your age and these other knockout factors are most likely to cause you trouble. Small and petty as they may be, you can’t ignore them. The moral code has its laws. And resume readers have theirs. You always gain by observing them and lose by violating them. Many of these defects can be repaired by being careful and applying the appropriate remedies.

-- Stanley and Jonathan Wynett, father-and-son professional resume writers with Stan Wynett Resumes in New York, are the authors of "Resumes to the Rescue" (1999, Performance Press Books Inc.) from which this article is adapted.