these 5 resume mistakes are hurting your job search

these 5 resume mistakes are hurting your job search these 5 resume mistakes are hurting your job search As a former hiring manager who now helps clients with their own hiring, I look at a lot of resumes. Day after day, I see job candidates severely harming their own chances by submitting resumes that do a terrible job of making it easy for employers to spot why they might be the right person for the job. Frustratingly, most people are making the same small number of easily fixable mistakes. I can’t write back to these candidates to tell them to clean up their resumes if they want a better shot at a job, but I can tell you!  These are the five most frequent mistakes I see and what you should be doing instead. 1. Writing a resume that reads like a series of job descriptions.  This is by far the most common mistake job applicants make: The bullet points they use to describe what they did at each job just list activities and read like a job description for the role might â€" for example, “edit documents,” “collect data,” or “manage website.” That conveys your job description, but it doesnt convey what kind of  employee you were, which is what employers care most about. After all, someone could engage in those activities and do a mediocre job of it; instead, your resume should convey that you excelled. That means that you should be talking about your achievements â€" what you accomplished, what the outcomes of your work were, and what made you shine in the role. It’s the difference between “managed billing” and “completely revamped client billing system to ensure bills are now sent out on schedule” or “resolved an inherited four-month backlog of invoices in three weeks .” 2. Leading with your education even thought it’s been years since you graduated from college.  Once you have some work experience, employers care most about what your work history has been and what you’ve accomplished. Your education is a distant second, so you should lead with your work history and save your education for the end. In fact, even if you’re a new grad, if you have relevant work experience, you should lead with that. (Some fields are an exception to this, but if you’re in one of them, you probably know it.) 3. Including a long list of “core competencies.” It’s fine to have a section that lists your skills, but too often people throw everything they can think of into this section, resulting in laughably long lists of skills that most hiring managers end up ignoring. If you choose to list skills on your resume, they should be hard skills that are truly distinguishing (such as software programs), not subjective self-assessments like “strong communication skills” or “works well in groups and independently.” It’s far better to demonstrate your skills not by listing them but by talking about how you’ve usedthose skills, via the bullet points describing what you’ve done at each job. That way, you can frame it in terms of what you accomplishedwith the skill, instead of just noting the skill itself. (Also: If you do decide to retain this section, please call it something other than “core competencies,” which is jargon that tends to makes hiring managers’ eyes glaze over . Calling the section Skills is fine.) 4. Including so much info before your work experience that it doesn’t start until the bottom of the page.  Sometimes job seekers load their resumes up with some much extra information that their work history doesn’t start until the bottom of the page or, worse, a second page. The thing that employers care most about when reviewing your resume is your work experience. You want it to be the first thing they see; don’t bury it deep into the document. 5. Including every job you’ve ever had, no matter how long ago or irrelevant to what you do now.  A resume isn’t supposed to be a comprehensive accounting of every job you’ve ever held. Rather, it’s a marketing document that you should edit to present yourself in the strongest possible light. That means that you may not need to include every job you’ve ever had or jobs from two decades ago. Focus on more recent work (the last 10-15 years) and the work that most closely relates to the job you’re applying for.