Now that you know what to put on your resume, let’s at a few things you should leave off if you want to get interviews.
Irrelevant jobs
If you have a long work history, considering removing some jobs that aren’t relevant, or were at the very beginning of your career (especially if you’ve been working 15–20 years or more).
Note that you shouldn’t remove an irrelevant job if it’s going to leave your employment history empty. For example if you’ve only held one job but it’s not relevant to what you want to do next, you should still keep it.
Why? It’s better to put a job that don’t seem closely related to your current job search, than to put nothing for your “Employment History”.
And you can always show traits like leadership, accountability, hard work, problem-solving, etc., in your past work history, no matter what job you had! So hiring managers might still find it relevant and impressive.
An “Objective” section
Use a Career Summary section instead, as mentioned earlier in the article.
Anything that makes it more than 2 pages
Unless you have a Ph.D. and are writing an academic CV… or unless you’ve been working for 10–15+ years… your resume should not be more than two pages.
For 75–80% of people, it should really only be one page.
So focus on what’s most important and keep the length short.
As a recruiter, I’d rather see 8 specific skills that are relevant to the job I’m hiring for, rather than a list of 30 general skills that you’ve used throughout your career but might not be relevant to the job. So make your resume laser-focused and target their needs!
Spelling or grammar mistakes
Proofread and spellcheck everything.
You are very unlikely to get called for an interview if you have a spelling or grammar mistake on your resume — and nobody’s going to tell you either.
So you need to find it yourself, or have a friend proofread it carefully for you!
Here’s a little trick if you proofread it yourself: temporarily change your resume to an unusual font before proofreading. It will help you spot errors (sounds crazy, I know. But it works).
