Common Resume Mistakes

This is:

• a list — in no particular order — of recurring resume writing errors I find
• formed from my personal perspective after reading easily tens of thousands of resumes over the last 15 years as a hiring manager, interviewer, recruiter, and mentor
• specifically tailored for candidates in the information technology sector, including software engineering, network engineering, information security, product management, and program management roles
• relevant to candidates seeking jobs in the United States (I have some experience with resumes geared for certain international markets, but this document is not written for those areas)
• a general brain dump accumulated over time, which will continue to grow (feel free to suggest more items in comments)
• a tool to quickly communicate feedback to people and avoid re-typing the same things (i.e. I may suggest a candidate look at certain numbered items in this list after I review their resume)

This is not:

• an endless narrative about how to write a resume
• a broad assertion of universal truths

Remember:

• The purpose of a resume when applying for jobs is to describe a candidate quickly, succinctly and to convey their most important/valuable/relevant qualifications to the prospective employer.
• Resumes say far more to the reader about a candidate than the literal meaning of the words alone, including writing ability, attention to detail, ability to prioritize, ability to understand and communicate the impact of the candidate’s experiences, awareness of the industry/professional context.
• Yes, an unqualified candidate can use the services of a professional resume writer to minimize the odds of triggering a red flag for a reader — but this doesn’t mean that flaws are OK. A resume reader doesn’t assume a candidate is perfect just because they have a perfect-looking resume — but resume mistakes *do* count against candidates.

Without more ado…

1. Including every class you’ve taken in your major. If almost everyone in your degree takes the class, don’t list it. If the class is unusual but doesn’t relate directly to your line of work or contribute to your personal narrative, don’t list it. In many cases, it is not a good idea to have a “Relevant Courses” list/section at all.
   Caveat: If you’re not a job-relevant major that the interviewer would be aware of, then listing courses relevant to the job is crucial (i.e. if you’re an English major with a CS minor, you’d want to specify which CS courses you’ve taken to fulfill your minor). This advice above applies specifically to cases where the course list would be well understood by the interviewer based on the degree.
2. Listing skills or technologies you’ve used. Simply put, a“Relevant Skills” list/section is a waste of space that nobody who matters will read. Of course you personally have some elaborate and well considered logic that you used to form the list on your resume. Understand that these are very, very frequently used by candidates to pack in random terms in hopes of catching someone’s eye — the result is actually the inverse. The main problem is that the skills list has zero context, which candidates capitalize on. A skill in a skills list could mean “I’m the leading expert in this technology in the world and use it every day” or it could mean “I watched a 2-minute YouTube video summarizing the topic 5 years ago and it sounded cool” — and candidates actually do add the fluff frequently on the basis that they’re technically not lying because they don’t have to write what they did with the skill.
   Instead, mention skills in descriptions of jobs and projects. This adds context like when you used it, what you did with it, the challenges encountered, etc. Generally speaking, if a skill can’t be listed in a job or project description, it doesn’t belong on a resume (but could be a talking point in an interview if relevant).
   If this description doesn’t do it for you (you’re not alone), please take a look at this much more detailed, expanded article I’ve written to address many common ideas, questions, concerns, personal scenarios, etc involving skills lists: https://medium.com/@danielceckert/lets-talk-about-resume-skills-lists-15e086d49dae
3. Including bars, numeric ratings, or adjectives to self-assess a candidate’s capability with a skill. If you insist on listing skills, definitely do not self-assess your abilities. Your assessments will be wrong, no matter what. Including the super cool scheme you came up with that is very detailed in how you consider each skill. Describing yourself as an expert or even “advanced” knowledge of a particular skill is an invitation for an interviewer to challenge you to suss out your actual ability, and some interviewers go farther to prove a point at the candidate’s expense by forcing the candidate to fail repeatedly in areas the candidate claims expertise. There is no benefit to including these self assessments; at the very best, they will be ignored by the reader.
4. Including your GPA. Everybody has different logic about where the cutoff is to implement this (3.75, 3.5, 3.3, 3.0, 2.8, 2.5, …). Companies that discriminate by GPA are making a significant mistake, but prejudicing against candidates for *not* including a GPA would be an even bigger mistake. Leave it off but be up front and immediately answer with your exact GPA if asked. Few places will ask you but the ones that will ask typically bring up the question at the end of the hiring process as an HR formality.
5. Using too many words to state your area of study. Keep it short and sweet . Instead of “Pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science” write “B.S. Computer Science”.
6. Using too many words to describe your academic standing. If you include your GPA, keep it simple. Do not use fractions (instead of “3.56/4.00” just say “3.56” — a GPA is always out of 4.00). Do not discuss your credits/standing (instead, omit your start date and simply state an expected graduation date if your schooling is currently in progress — the time remaining until graduation makes your standing/progress clear).
7. Failing to maintain consistent format throughout the resume. Pick a format and stick with it. Jobs, Projects, and Education entries should all have the same key information — title (or degree), employer (or school, or project name), date range, and description. If you use bullets for descriptions, use bullets in all entries (don’t switch from bullets to paragraphs). If you use full sentences with periods, use them everywhere (and vice versa if using fragments rather than sentences). For some reason, people frequently use completely different formats for projects and jobs. Line spacing/padding/margins are also included in this consistency.
8. Using hyperlinks on regular words (not URLs). These can be helpful but look dumb when the resume is printed (i.e. makes it look like you don’t know how printers/paper work). Bonus points if you’re applying to a job that might remotely involve an understanding of information security (i.e. delivering a malicious payload from a link in a PDF) — bad impression in that case.
9. Listing URLs. This one is a bit nuanced, not a broad stroke. The big problem comes when a candidate is dumping URLs everywhere (LinkedIn, GitHub, 6 projects, etc) and when they throw in URLs that are more than a dozen characters long or so. Nobody wants to type in 50 characters. Also, putting a ton of URLs can backfire because they’ll either not look at any or they’ll pick at random — include the most valuable/important ones to you. Better to not include any than to include too many. Don’t include LinkedIn URLs and other similar things where the content is the same (or very similar) to what you have on your resume (waste of time — if a reader is only going to go to one or two URLs, you don’t want them wasting the click/type on LinkedIn). Also consider using a URL shortener like http://bit.ly/ or http://goo.gl/ to make long URLs better for your resume.
10. Using passive or elaborately vague language in job descriptions. “Helped coordinate a project that assisted…” — all of those words strung together completely destroys any meaning you were trying to convey because they don’t concisely state what you personally did.
11. Describing companies, products, or other people in job descriptions. Use the text to concisely describe what you personally did and what the impact was. Anything else is useless fluff.
12. Packing text using small font, tiny line spacing, or tiny margins. This makes a candidate look desperate and/or bad at understanding how to communicate in written forms. 9/10 times the candidate is using excessive or passive language and/or including info that doesn’t need to be included. In almost every case, a resume that commits this crime can be easily reduced to 1" margins with normal font size and proper line spacing with a few minutes of aggressive content reduction.
13. Using incorrect localization formats for phone numbers, degrees, physical addresses, etc. If you’re applying to a job in the United States, you should have a phone number that uses the US country code (+1) so that’s irrelevant — omit the country code and use either (xxx) xxx-xxxx or xxx-xxx-xxxx or xxx.xxx.xxxx as your numbering format. If you’re applying to a US job, use US labels for your degree (i.e. “BS” instead of “BSci”). Similarly, use the right mailing address format for the country you’re applying to jobs in. Failing to properly use local standards for these small details is a signal to potential employers that you are unfamiliar with local culture and may have trouble adjusting to basic expectations in their office that locals take for granted.
14. Including a photo of yourself. This can result in immediate rejection of a resume without any consideration. Photos can suggest factors like race, age, gender, national origin, religion, etc that are illegal for US employers to consider when making hiring decisions; even if a candidate is disqualified on merit, if the employer has been presented with illegal-to-discriminate information about a candidate, there is heightened risk to the employer. In some cases, candidates file lawsuits against employers if they feel unfairly discriminated against, so employers often limit information given to candidates about reasons for rejection to limit the employers’ risk; this can mean simply discarding a resume with a photo on it without ever responding to the candidate.
15. Including too many pages. Only include more than one page if you have enough content to justify it. If you think you’re exception and that you have enough content to go past one page, you’re almost certainly wrong — especially if you’re still in your first 5–10 years of fulltime employment. Even if you have a ton of cool side projects or a bunch of jobs. Even if your friends are impressed by your 4-page detailed listing of every responsibility at every job you’ve had ever. Only have one page. If you have more than one page, keep it to 2 pages. A reader only spend ~10 seconds on their first glance — you’ve got to make a compelling case for why they need to consider it further and why it’s worth turning from page 1 to page 2.
16. Including icons or graphics. These are distracting and a waste of space.The exception here is if you’re applying for a graphic design role where you benefit from showing your visual ability. Nowadays crazy design templates are a dime a dozen, so the resume is no longer a place to show your personal ability/uniqueness (the reader will assume it’s a template made by someone else). For non-design roles, this is simply a waste of space and distracts the reader.
17. Using text/line colors that do not print properly on black and white printers. You may have beautifully printed color copies to hand to someone in person, but anything that gets copied or reprinted by interviewers is going to be black and white (in almost all cases). That cool red or yellow is going to end up looking like a weird grey and will not have anywhere near the same impact you intended when carefully designing the reader’s experience.
18. Using edge-to-edge print design. That super sexy glossy look you made in Adobe Illustrator looks sweet, right up until someone tried to print it. The text ended up tiny and now there’s a weird 1" white border around the whole thing. And it looks like you don’t know how printers work.
19. Using colored backgrounds behind text. See #17 — this results in a bad reader experience on black and white printers and makes it look like you don’t know how printers work.
20. Using 2 columns when content doesn’t justify it. Most of the time, 2-column formats are justified using some of the sins earlier in this list, like skills lists, excessive language for education, course lists, hyperlinks, etc. Once the earlier sins are fixed, the content almost never justifies wasting all the empty space remaining in the second column.
21. Bolded/italicized/underlined words scattered throughout descriptions (i.e. bolded skills/technologies). These are incredibly distracting for readers and make it difficult/impossible to properly read the descriptions you wrote. Also, this styling frequently clashes with the formatting for headers / companies / titles / etc to make the problem even worse. This is one of the things that sounds like a really good idea when writing a resume in terms of logically “grouping” things using formatting, but is actually terrible delivery for a reader.
22. Listing grades in classes taken. If you do list relevant courses, do not list the grade you earned in each. It really, truly doesn’t matter and is distracting, wastes the reader’s time (as they consider why you got a Cin your Data Structures class, etc), and wastes valuable space.
23. Including physical location of a school, job, project, etc. This is distracting and a waste of space at best. In some cases it can be used to discriminate against a candidate (i.e. if the locations are all in a different country from the job you’re applying to, the employer may make assumptions about the candidate’s availability, visa status, or culture compatibility).
24. Making grammar mistakes. These can create prejudices in readers (i.e. if you make mistakes that are common to certain regions or non-native English speakers), or simply give the impression that you don’t know how to write, or that you didn’t bother to have someone proofread your resume.
25. Including an objective statement. Objective statements that are vague and fluffy mean nothing to a reader and waste valuable space on your resume. If you include an objective statement, it must be highly specific and set you apart as a candidate, ideally with very specific goals and measurable outcomes — and even then, readers may skip reading it because they’re accustomed to objective statements being meaningless. Generally speaking, don’t bother.
26. Including a summary. Too often, summary notes at the top of a resume are redundant, vague, and rambling. Particularly on a 1-page resume, a summary has limited value — all of the content you have is right in front of the reader already, and keeping the text concise and well structured allows the reader to easily see the most important parts; in these cases, a summary actually hurts readability rather than helping.
27. Using long sentences or seemingly endless paragraphs. Whether joined by periods, commas, or semicolons, large blocks of text can be difficult to read and visually daunting. Consider bullets instead, ideally where each bullet has a maximum of a single line of text.
28. Listing award names without describing when they happened or what they mean. Awards should have a brief description explaining how you earned them (i.e. not just “1st place at XYZ Hackathon”). Timeframe is important to give context for your skills/experience.
29. Using multiple sentences per bullet. Great choice to use bullets! But they should be improved — bullets should have a single sentence/statement per line. A bullet that has multiple sentences or long multi-statement phrases is difficult for a reader to parse quickly and can make the resume look cluttered.
30. Indicating whether a role was paid, volunteer, intern, freelance, part-time, or full-time. This can only hurt a candidate by allowing judgment from a reader on this factor. Describe your timeline, work, and impact, and let that speak for itself.
31. M-dashes, hyphens, or space-separated hyphens — be consistent in your usage. This most commonly occurs in date ranges, where a resume will read “Jan 2016 — Feb 2017” in one place, “Jan 2016-Feb 2017” in another place (etc). Some word processors may autocorrect your input — be careful that these details are included in your proofreading. It’s an easy mistake and looks sloppy to a reader.
32. Including high school education and experiences. This is fine to do as long as you’re only 1–2 years after high school and don’t have any other experience yet. However, high school education and experiences should drop off your resume very quickly once you get into college and start getting new projects and jobs.
33. Inconsistent verb tense. Make sure you use past and present tense verbs correctly throughout your resume. Using present tense in a prior job description confuses a reader — maybe the job hasn’t finished, or maybe you just didn’t proofread the resume when you updated the dates for the job/project.
34. Incorrect ordering of experiences/projects. Always list items in reverse-chronological order. Current/Present experiences first, starting with the most recently begun; then continuing in order by end date. http://www.resume-resource.com/reverse-chronological-resume-example/
35. Header is too large. A large header can look artistically interesting or imposing, but wastes a lot of space and can be a liability, especially when a resume has a lot of content packed tightly into the remaining space. Shrinking an oversize header can be a solution to improve spacing and readability.
36. Inappropriate line wraps. When one or just a few words bleed onto a second line, it wastes space and looks weird. It is also easily fixed by improving the language and conciseness of the text used. Keep bullets to a single line whenever possible.
37. Use of seasons instead of months in timeframes. Seasons (Fall/Spring) are vague and hide the true duration of experiences. Use “Month Year” format to describe timeframes more precisely. A reader shouldn’t have to guess what you mean.
    Candidates frequently use season labels to make it sound like they’ve spent more time on a project/role than they actually did (i.e. “Fall 2016 — Spring 2017” where they actually meant December 16 — January 17, makes a 1–2 month experience sound plausibly like up to 9–10 months if the reader reads it as something more like August 16 — May 17). Month when a project/hackathon/etc happened also matters a lot when piecing together the narrative of a candidate’s skill — for instance, if they’re taking a data structures class in Fall 2017 and did a hackathon project that could be done either simply without data structures or more efficiently with data structures, and if the candidate says “Fall 2017”, saying “August 2017” or “December 2017” can change the details and progression of knowledge/experience for the reader and affect the type of questions they get in an interview.
    This is a theme throughout some of the other mistakes I’ve covered above — precision is benefits the candidate. If an interviewer digs into something that was vague that the interviewer needs for the role and it turns out the candidate doesn’t actually have that thing, it’s a waste of time for both the candidate and interviewer. Being honest and precise up front might not get you the interview, but it will also save you the embarrassment and bad interview report on file at the employer that has a note like “lied on resume, didn’t actually have xyz experience that was claimed/implied”.
38. Emphasizing company names more than roles/titles. First, congratulations on your role at a super sexy company! Now, down to business — what did you actually do? Also, how has your career progressed so far? Emphasizing roles/titles above company names can allow the reader to do a quick glance through these things. (i.e. if your last 3 roles were “Senior Software Engineer”, “Software Engineer” and “Software Engineering Intern” that is a great initial message to the reader about your growth). Company names definitely carry meaning — this is just to say that prioritizing the company name may not be the best approach. This resume sin manifests itself typically as making the company name bold/larger or on a first line before the job title (i.e. “Google — Software Engineer”).The fix can be as simple as reversing the content in the same format (i.e. “Software Engineer — Google”). Caveat: Emphasizing company names more than roles/titles can be moderately acceptable (not *bad* but not good either — neutral) if all of the experience shown on your resume is the same level (i.e. you have so much experience that you’re only showing your senior-level experience from the last 3 years; or you are so early in your career that all you have is internships / first job or two and they’re all software engineering roles).
39. Incorrect date abbreviations. If you’re using 3-letter abbreviations for months, do them correctly. June and July still need to be abbreviated if you’re doing 3-letter format (“Jun” and “Jul”, respectively). If you’re doing 3-letter abbreviations, September is abbreviated as “Sep” not “Sept”.
40. Omitted dates on projects or awards. Dates give context for the progression of your training/career and also give the reader an understanding of how recently you’ve done which type(s) of work, which is critical in understanding how familiar a candidate may be with certain skills and the order in which they’ve learned/encountered various skills.
41. Giving yourself a title in your header. Assigning a self-described title like “Software Developer”, “Computer Engineering Student”, “Hacker & Maker”, etc is both unnecessary and can negatively impact how your reader views you. Let your experience speak for itself .
42. Including your street address / city / state in the header. If the company wants to know where you live, they’ll ask. This is rarely a benefit and often can be a detractor — i.e. if the company rules you out vs a local candidate or thinks of you a certain way based on the address/location you list.