Over the years I have read hundreds of resumes and I am stunned at the varying quality of them, especially considering the massive amount of resources online that tell you how to write a good resume. There is a lot of good advice out there and there is some that isn’t great. There is also a lot that is so high level it isn’t helpful at all. So here are 10 tips taken from life.
1. Visual Presentation Matters
If you’ve applied for a job, there is a really good chance that so have several other people, if not hundreds of other people. A lot of people think that this means they need to stand out from the crowd by channelling their inner graphic designer
Your job is to make reading your CV as easy as possible, be it by human or bot. If you are applying for a summer job and want to go all out on Canva then this tip may be less appealing to you than others. However, as a general rule if you are applying for a professional job that is in an office (yes, this includes your working-from-home office) unless you’re in a super creative industry where they expect you to demonstrate your graphic design ability, keep it clean and simple.
The follow are some examples of bad resume formatting I have come across.
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Don’t use stupid fonts.
Stick to something like Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Calibri, etc. In case you’re wondering this isn’t limited to 16-year-old girls. There are plenty of grown men who make this mistake.
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Don’t highlight the parts of your resume you want me to pay attention to.
If your resume is well written the key information should be easy for me to notice. Also, highlighting parts of documents is a common technique for flagging the bits that you need to review so it looks like your resume is both yelling at me and unfinished.
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Don’t use lots of different fonts
and sizes
and colours
and emphasis
as a way of differentiating between headings, subheadings, etc. The default Microsoft style sets are awful so don’t use them as things get messy and hard to read really quickly.
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Don’t double space your resume because you’re worried it’s too short. If you’re at the beginning of your career and you’ve got a short CV that’s okay – no-one expects your CV to be five pages long if you only have five years’ experience. Don’t insult your audience by bloating the page count.
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In a future post I will critique a number of the Canva templates as some are better than others. For now, the best Canva template is probably the Paula Wilson CV, which is also really easy to replicate in MS Word or Google Docs.
2. Open with a Profile statement
In days gone by, the advice was to put an “Objective” statement at the top of your CV where you told the prospective employer what you were looking for in a job. News flash, this isn’t about your needs and what you want, it’s about the employer and what they want (yes, even in a hot jobs market). Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the employer is there to solve your “I want a new job” problem. You are there to solve the employer’s problem which is that they need an additional employee, so you need to explain why you are a solution to that problem.
A “Profile” is 4-5 sentences that tie together who you are, what your experience is and what you’re bringing to the table. Some sites recommend that this be in bullet points but it reads better as a statement. Whether you write it in the first or third person is up to you.
In a future post we will do a deep dive into how to write a good “Profile” statement.
3. Always include a cover letter
A CV and a cover letter should be a matching set wherever possible. Even if the application doesn’t expressly ask for one or lists the cover letter as optional you should submit one anyway. This is especially important if you’re changing industries or role types.
A resume is a statement of fact and actually varies very little between job applications as most of the jobs that you apply for are likely to be in the same vein. (If you apply for a data analyst job one day and a sous chef role the next, you might want two different resumes.) The cover letter is your opportunity to create a clear narrative for your work history and explain why you would be the right fit for the role. This is where you connect your experience to the job advertisement. If you are doing a career pivot or you’re levelling up, don’t expect the employer to do the hard work and figure out how your background translates to their role. Make it easy for them by connecting all the dots in a cover letter.
In a future post we will do a deep dive into how to write a good cover letter.
4. Clearly state achievements and contributions
Far too many resumes are lists of responsibilities. All this does is tell an employer what you were supposed to do, not how good you were at it. If you want me to hire you you need to tell me what you’ve actually achieved in your career. I want you to tell me about your performance, not just copy and paste a bunch of job descriptions.
Articulating your achievements and contributions is actually harder than people think, especially for women. Women achieve just as much as men do but have a fear of being considered arrogant if they actually take credit for their work. It takes practice to frame your work day as a series of contributions to a successful outcome. There are a lot of things we do each day that we don’t notice because we’ve been doing them for so long, but these are the things that earn us our paychecks. These are what make you a valuable employee and the whole point of your CV is to communicate this value to a stranger.
If you get to the interview stage you’re going to need to articulate your achievements and contributions anyway so you may as well put some thought into it now and put it in your CV.
5. Don’t lie
Wow. I am stunned at how many people still use creative licence on their CVs. From their experience to their qualifications, some people struggle to keep it real. Yes, I have even had people submit forged certificates. Not only did they not get hired they went on a “never hire” list for that company as well as my personal “never hire” list.
There are a lot of areas in life where faking it until you make is a great strategy. Faking it on your CV is a bad strategy. You will get away with it some of the time, but even if you only get caught once you will lose credibility with that employer forever. Your professional reputation depends on your credibility and integrity and you can lose that in a minute.
Make sure that if it goes on your CV you can talk about it in detail in an interview. If you can’t talk to it, take it off your CV.
6. Don’t get carried away with superlatives
Adjectives are an important part of a CV, but be careful about superlatives. You can’t write “experienced in X” over and over or else you’ll send people to sleep. There will come a point were you can start adding quantifying adjectives such as “significant”, “extensive”, “comprehensive” or “considerable” before the word “experience”, but not until you’ve got at least 15 years in the workforce under your belt.
I frequently see people early in their career journey embellishing their level of experience. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re three years into your career you don’t have “significant” experience in anything. Saying that you do will only make me think that you’re a little delusional and will likely get you bumped from the “interview” pile.
7. Don’t put your agency as your employer
This one is only relevant for people who have worked as contractors through an agency. It is common in a lot of industries to engage people as contractors, rather than staff. If you are one of the contractors that’s fine, but don’t put “Genesis Personnel Agency” down as your employer if you spent 12 months working at Apple. Instead, list the employer for this chapter of your career as “Apple (contractor)”. No-one cares who paid your wages, they want to know about the job that you did.
This also becomes important for online job applications because the software that scans your CV to pre-fill a form might overlook the relevant company name and you’ll get penalised for this.
8. Have a professional looking email address
I’m not an advocate of putting your full residential address on your CV for privacy reasons, but you are going to have to provide some way of contacting you. This is going to be your email address and your mobile phone number. You’re not signing up for a marketing newsletter here, you are applying for a job so your email address is part of the way your present yourself. If your normal everyday email address is something silly like funkystoner69@hotmail.com then this is not appropriate for your resume. A random alphanumeric string like 11hgi33k@gmail.com is also not appropriate as it looks like spam and will always get sent to the Junk folder.
If you don’t have a decent one already, set up a new email address with a standard provider (e.g. @gmail.com, @outlook.com, @icloud.com) and have it resemble your name. For example, if your name is Sarah Smith you might have smith.s.j@outlook.com. All mail applications are design to run multiple email address so this is going to be about 90 seconds of your time to set up and zero time to manage going forwards.
9. Don’t address your application to “Dear Sir”
Yep. We are over twenty years into the 21st Century and people still send job applications addressed “Dear Sir”. Even if you’re applying for a STEM or finance job there is a good chance that your audience is not male. By opening with “Dear Sir” you are showing a level of ignorance (and potentially bias) and you’ve now got a black mark against you and you’re only two words into your application.
The safest bet is to go with “To Whom it May Concern”. There was a big push a few years ago to move away from this salutation but unless you know the actual name of the person that is going to be reviewing your application, “To Whom it May Concern” isn’t going to offend anyone.
I still see “Dear Hiring Manager” which is also gender neutral but no-one is called “Hiring Manager” in real life so it’s meaningless and looks a little dated.
10. Referees available on request
Unless you are doing an online application where providing referees is a required field, do not list your referees on your CV. You want to control the process here. If you provide your referees up front you won’t know when the employer is going to call your referee and so you will not have the opportunity to give your referee a heads up and talk them through the position you’ve applied for so they know the right things to say. You also won’t know where you are in the interview process until after the fact. You are better off withholding them until the recruiter or prospective employer rings and asks for them.
Also, referees need to be professional referees, not your aunt or next door neighbour. If this is your very first job then you’re not going to have any professional referees so you can use your hockey coach or maths teacher or church youth group leader, but it needs to be someone who isn’t related to you. As soon as you get your first job you need to make sure that you identify someone who you can use as a referee for your next job.
This is not an exhaustive list of resume tips but they are small things that you will get penalised for if you don’t get them right. They are also easy to do and you can implement them all today. Good luck!
