Really Dumb Resume Mistakes

This is the single most important concept of this book, and I repeat it several hundred times (seems like, anyway) throughout the book. This seems obvious, but honestly, most people don’t really understand this until it’s pointed out to them. Ask someone what their resume is, and the answer goes something like, “it’s the thing you send out to get a job.” Well yes, but no, not really. It’s much more than that, and you can’t approach it quite that haphazardly. Here’s why:

You, like everyone else in the world, are a complex person with many skills, faults, likes, dislikes, aptitudes, challenges, etc. You could fill a book writing about your personality alone. But you don’t have time to write it, and even if you did, I, your prospective employer wouldn’t read it. I’m busy. Really busy. I have an entire, 50-hour-a-week job to do, and that doesn’t count this whole process of sifting through resumes and doing job interviews. Plus, I prefer crime novels anyway.

So we’ve established that I don’t want to read your life story – at least, not now. But you still want the job, so you have to tell me something about yourself, and it does need to be substantive. Needs to be long on substance and short on B.S. that I’d rather not waste my time reading. And this, my friends, is why God created resumes.

Resumes exist for you, the applicant, to succinctly tell me, the employer, everything I need to know about exactly why I should hire you — and not a bit more (did I mention you’ll hear that a lot before you get to the end of this book?). Later on in this book, I’ll examine in some pretty fine detail what you should and shouldn’t include in your resume. But first, before you even start your resume (or start to make changes to it, which you’ll almost certainly do after you’ve read this book from beginning to end), here are a couple of things you need to know first.

Many people, especially those applying for their first real job, have a very “wishful-thinking” scenario in their heads about what happens when they send their resumes off to a prospective employer. In this scenario, the boss usually sits at a huge desk in a pristine office with a lovely view. His eyeglasses (or her eyeglasses – you choose, it’s your fantasy) are dropped slightly down on his nose, and with every line he reads, he nods ever more approvingly, more assured than ever that you’re the best person for the job. He picks up his phone and calls Smith in the corner office. “Smith, have you seen the resume for this Jane Doe? Wow! Now that’s who we need!” He hangs up. He hits the speakerphone call button again. His assistant answers. “Justin, we need to get this Jane Doe in for an interview right away. Please call her and set something up this week, today if possible.” Justin the Assistant calls you and tells you that Mr. Boss likes your resume and would like you to come in. You do. After 10 minutes of getting to know each other, your suitability for the throne is confirmed, and the job is yours.

Now, here’s what really happens. Your resume arrives in the HR department, where it’s opened and placed in a stack with hundreds of others. The stack continues to grow until the HR department determines it’s gotten big enough. Then that stack is delivered not to the boss, but the unlucky slug that gets the job of sorting through them all. This unlucky slug probably isn’t excited about the prospect of sifting through 800 resumes, since his other job responsibilities haven’t decreased any, and this will only pack his schedule more tightly than it’s already packed.

But he doesn’t want to be responsible for hiring a dud, so he takes the task seriously. Over a period of days, he sifts through the resumes, hoping to weed out the 90 percent of resumes that all sound the same and discover the exceptional ones………..

but more than likely, it’s in the middle. <emphasize the “I won’t get that far” angle. Remember that I as the employer will never get my first impression from you, yourself. I’ll get it from your resume. You may be the most charismatic and knowledgeable person alive. You may have the straightest teeth around, spring-fresh deodorant and a fantastic interview outfit that makes you look so fantastic that no one could see you in it without offering you a job. But it doesn’t matter. If your resume sucks, you’ll never get the chance to show me any of it, because I won’t want to interview you.

Ever thought of it that way? Makes sense, doesn’t it?

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How? Because everyone and his mom has access to millions of job listings. Used to be, if you lived in Iowa and saw a job opening, you could be pretty sure that you were only going to be competing with other Iowans for that job. But not today – thanks to the Monster.coms of the world, millions of people from Tokyo to Texas to Timbuktu all have access to that little Iowa job listing.

And that’s not all. Your worldwide competitors don’t even have to air-mail their resumes across the pond. It’s all done in one click of the mouse.

Now, at first, you probably think that’s a great thing. From the comfort and privacy of your computer desk, you can apply for 200 jobs around the world in just a couple of hours, right? Sweet!

Well…ok, that’s pretty sweet, I’ll give you that. But the picture gets dimmer when you realize that, because it’s so easy to do, millions of other people are out there doing the same thing. They’re applying for the same jobs you’re applying for, flooding the employers with thousands and thousands of resumes… and burying yours underneath them all. Each resume that comes in is one that might be better than yours.

So thanks to the Web, every job posted today will get hundreds of applicants, if not thousands. The person in charge of reviewing the resumes – who almost always has other, more time-consuming duties than hiring new people — doesn’t review these all right as they come in. I know, I know – in your mind, they grab your envelope the minute the mail carrier drops off the mail, rip it open, and immediately read it carefully, marveling at all your accomplishments. They can’t help but smile about what a fine individual you must be.

What really happens is this: they get tossed in a pile or an email folder, and when the time comes to finally review them, there’s a stack. A fucking HUGE stack.You might be at the top — that’s good, because the first one is always remembered fairly well. You might be at the bottom — that’s good, too, because the last one is the freshest and easiest to remember. But likely, you’ll be in the middle, and that’s not good. People in the middle get forgotten much more often than those at the top or bottom – that’s a simple fact that you probably learned in Psych 101.

For this one particular life exercise — finding a job — you have to unlearn all the nice self-esteem lessons about how unique you are and how no one else is like you, blah blah blah. But there are ways to differentiate yourself.

As an employer, my time is valuable. Employer mindset is that simply by picking this up and looking at it, I’m doing you a favor. This is especially true now, in a situation where there are 100 people applying for every job and internship you post. So before I even lay eyes on it, you owe me to make the content of this resume worth my time to read it. Everything you include on it should be worth reading. Most people don’t – most people screw up in some way. Making it worth my time involves many things:

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My agency once managed a very large online events calendar for a major news website in Phoenix, where I live. It was a very important job, but it didn’t require a great deal of experience, so we placed an ad at Arizona State University, looking for an intern to handle the job of editing the calendar. We got dozens of responses, but my favorite one went something like this:

Dear Mr. Barsch:

I read with great interest about the job of calender editor with your company. I think I would be an excellent candidate for this job, because I currently work on the events calender for my church, and am very aware of community events and also good with computers. I am excited about the opportunity to become your calender editor and look forward to talking more with you about this opportunity.

Sincerely,
Jane Doe

Maybe I’m biased because I’ve been a fairly decent speller since I was young, but come on – are you kidding me? The average fifth grader can spell the word “calendar,” I guarantee you. And if you can’t – hey, get up and walk to one of the walls in your dorm room or apartment. See that big thing with all the squares and numbers on it? Check the cover, and I guarantee you’ll see the word “CALENDAR” written somewhere on it. Copy that spelling. That’s all you have to do to get it right.

Against my better judgment, I couldn’t resist writing this girl back. I don’t consider myself to be a crusader for correct spelling, because that’s a losing battle if ever there was one. Usually these things just get deleted, but some people are begging for a little correction. And I told myself to feel good about it, because my “tough love” might actually help this girl someday. So I wrote her back, and my response went something like this:

Dear Jane,

Thanks for your inquiry about the calendar job. I wanted to be frank with you and tell you that you were eliminated from consideration for the job due to the fact that you misspelled “calender” three times in your email. To be honest, I couldn’t trust you to do error-free work as a calendar editor when you’re unable to spell the word “calendar.” I wish you the best of luck in the future.

Best regards,

Josh Barsch

I didn’t expect her to feel good when she received it, but sometimes you need to hear the unpleasant truth in order to improve, right? Well, not according to Jane. She actually wrote back.

Dear Mr. Barsch,

I don’t know why you had to write me back just to tell me about my spelling. I would have liked it better if you had not written me back at all. I am not a perfect speller, but I still think I could have done a very good job.

Jane Doe

So much for trying to be helpful.

Many people today tend to say that spelling on your resume matters less depending on the nature of the job you’re applying for. They say things like, “What do you expect? I’m in marketing!” or “I spray for termites. Don’t expect me to win the spelling bee.” But that’s not the point. No one expects you to be a perfect speller or grammarian in your day-to-day life; however, your resume is supposed to be your one-time, absolute best possible effort. It’s not just you — it’s you and the dictionary and whoever you can find to proofread it, taking as much time as you need to make this ONE document perfect. Yes, perfect – no errors whatsoever.

Whether you like it or not, if you misspell words on a resume, you are telling your employer that you’re lazy, and that’s the worst possible thing to tell a potential employer. We think, “Wow, if this person is putting his/her best foot forward on a resume and it still looks half-assed, then can you imagine how half-assed his/her work is going to be?”

So how do you get your resume into tip-top, error-free shape, even if you can’t spell worth a damn? For starters, of course, use the spell-check function on your computer program. That will catch most of the obvious errors. But once the document is spell-checked, give a copy of it to friends, teachers, spouse, children or whoever else you know that’s a better speller than you are. Ask them straight out, “Would you mind taking two minutes to check my resume for mistakes? I’m not a great speller.”

Don’t be embarrassed to say you’re not a good speller – trust me, you’re in good company. Once you’ve had a few people glance over it for errors, you should have an error-free document. It doesn’t take long, and it can make the difference between getting the job and getting your resume tossed in the garbage.

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Most of what I just said about spelling applies to grammar as well, although there is one slight difference: most people, including your potential employers, are not masters of grammar. You can screw up a little here and there, and it’ll go unnoticed. For instance, should you say “if I were a rich man” or “if I was a rich man”? Unless you’re applying for a copy editor job at a newspaper, it’s not a big deal, because copy editors are just about the only people in the world who know every grammatical nuance of the English language (by the way, the answer is “were” – I used to be a copy editor). On the other hand, if you misspell “calendar,” that’ll jump out at everyone who sees your resume.

If you don’t know the difference between “their” and “there,” “its” and “it’s” and “your” and “you’re,” then don’t leave college yet.

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