Do you have anything like the following on your resume? excellent written and oral communication skills strong initiative visionary leader creative innovator able to present strategic concepts clearly and persuasively If so, remove it! Remove it all! Your resume is for experience and accomplishments only. It’s not the place for subjective traits that anyone could […]
Read the full article →A reader writes: What is the professional way of saying on a resume, “I always take charge of things and people like me”? Writing that is clearly cringy. Maybe the cover letter is a better place? At my current company, I started in more of a technical role, but I did not supervise anyone. My […]
Read the full article →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 […]
Read the full article →An awful lot of people have internalized the old rule that your resume can only be one page and go through incredible contortions to keep their resumes to one page, even when they have years of experience. Other people apparently have never heard that they should think about resume length at all and thus create […]
Read the full article →A reader writes: I was wondering what your thoughts are in general on having a skills section on resumes. I’ve seen pretty ambiguous skills sometimes, but I only list concrete technical skills, e.g. video editing with Adobe Premiere, NOT things like “engages with industry influencers.” For me especially, I thought it would be helpful because […]
Read the full article →A bunch of people have sent me this article making its way around the internet that claims that you shouldn’t use Times New Roman on your resume. Like so much resume advice that focuses on the look of your resume rather than its substance, it’s wrong and you can ignore it. If you read the […]
Read the full article →A reader writes: I intern at a nonprofit organization that assists low-income community members with resumes. My supervisors provide us with very limited autonomy during the resume development process, and each resume we build must follow the style guidelines of our organization. We are required to have all resumes checked at least twice by a […]
Read the full article →A reader writes: I was very curious to see what you thought of this document that I found off of a job listing on usajobs.org entitled Resume Tips. I find it very odd that they recommend to have salary and hours listed for every job performed. The specific job I ended up applying for required […]
Read the full article →A reader writes: I’ve got an MBA from University of Phoenix and at first I was really proud of it. I’d worked really hard to get through the corporate finance classes. Marketing, management, human resources…it all seemed pretty standard stuff for an MBA, only with no PowerPoint presentations since everything was online. I thought I […]
Read the full article →A few weeks ago, I was contacted by someone who told me that she had purchased a professionally written resume and cover letter from a resume-writing company … and then had realized that the cover letter was nearly word-for-word the same as the one from a reader that I posted here last year. That set off […]
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