To help job seekers make the best first impression and convince a hiring manager that they’re qualified for a position, the world’s largest resume-writing service, TopResume, conducted a survey. This survey conducted between February 6, and February 10, 2018, asked 379 current and former recruiters, hiring managers, and human resource executives one essential question – “What are your biggest resume ‘deal-breakers’ that can cost a candidate the job?” and 69% of them confirmed ten major resume-writing blunders.
What this survey reveals is that job seekers usually make easy-to-correct errors on their resume that sabotage their chances of getting hired. But revealing deal-breaker resume errors is not everything this survey provided, it also unveils that job seekers do not know what a hiring manager is expecting from them, and something no recruiter wants is a very elaborate resume. Showing your tech-savvy persona to a hiring manager might actually penalize you, a rather simple and well-formatted resume may work better. The web-based Kukook service helps create good-looking resumes.
Below is the list of top ten resume deal-breakers revealed from TopResume’s recent survey:
- Spelling and/or grammatical errors
- Incorrect or missing contact information
- Unprofessional email address
- Outdated or irrelevant information (hobbies, age, marital status, etc.)
- Failure to demonstrate and quantify results
- Annoying buzzwords and/or obvious keyword stuffing
- Too generalized/not customized to match job listing
- Repetitive words or phrases used in multiple job descriptions
- Including a headshot
- Format and/or design is too elaborate
“We’ve all heard you never get a second chance to make a first impression, which is especially true when submitting your resume,” said Amanda Augustine, career advice expert for TopResume. Augustine also notes that job seekers get little to no chance of improving their resume applications because they never hear back from hiring managers once they send an application.
This survey aims to educate job seekers into knowing what pleases or turns recruiters off, allowing them to know the right way their skills should be represented. The most annoying errors according to this survey are related to spelling and grammatical errors, incorrect contact information, and an unprofessional email account. The good news is that these mistakes can be fixed in less than a minute, proofreading your resume, adding your correct address and phone number, and not using the same email you use for gaming should get every one start the right way.
This survey, additionally, reveals top reasons that stress job seekers about their current resume. According to it, job seekers struggle with finding the right keywords to make their application noticeable, a way to demonstrate their value to the employer, displaying their objective statement/professional summary, choosing the right type and amount of information, and sending customized resumes for specific job listings.
To help candidates submit deal-maker rather than deal-breaker resumes, TopResume will be holding an hour-long event on Facebook Live Chat at 12 pm EST, with David Gaspin, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, at Delos.
