The interview is critical to landing a job, but in most cases, it’s the resume that lands you the interview. For that reason, having an exceptional resume should be top priority for job seekers. Documents that are poorly written, badly organized or woefully outdated won’t do you any favors. In fact, more often than not, they’ll earn you a spot in the hiring authority’s “not a chance” stack of resumes.
Among the most common mistakes on resumes – we’re not accounting here for falsifications and the inclusion of irrelevant information – are misspellings and grammatical errors. A tragedy, really, when you consider that these are pitfalls we should have learned to avoid well before walking the stage at high school graduation.
According to research conducted by Grammarly:
- Students are expected to have learned proper use of capitalization and more advanced comma use by the 2nd grade.
- Learners should have built a working vocabulary and mastered spelling by the 6th grade.
Most news publications are written for a 6th– to 8th-grade reading level – already the bar for language mastery is set relatively low given that such a huge percentage of openings require candidates to hold bachelor’s degrees at a minimum – but much of what hiring managers see on incoming resumes seems to indicate that loads of applicants fall below this level. Probably the greatest cause for this is job seekers overlooking “minor” details. Typos and unfortunate word choice can and do slip by even the most meticulous editors. Also pay attention to punctuation, verb tense, and sentence structure.
Whatever your writing skill, it’s just good practice to give it a second (or third) eye before sending it out. Either proofread your own resume very thoroughly or have someone else, someone gifted in this area, review it for you. You want a hiring authority’s first impression of you to be a positive one.
Read more here.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
