As a recruiter, it’s interesting these days how people don’t think twice about posting their resume on any job board that becomes available.

These days it’s easy enough as it is to have personal details available on the web through various social media websites but when it comes to your resume you really want to keep track of where you post it so you can take it down again when you’re no longer looking for a new job.

It also helps just to ensure that you don’t have all sorts of versions of your resume floating around because as soon as a hiring manager or recruiter sees a few different versions, they’re going to wonder which one is correct.

Perhaps these days posting a resume online isn’t as big a deal for most people as it used to be. It wasn’t too long ago that people hid job searches from their current employer and maybe even their work colleagues for fear of getting caught.

These days though it isn’t even a surprise to see people’s LinkedIn profile show “career opportunities” as one of the reasons they’d like to be contacted on the site so clearly times have changed.

Having said that, your resume has value so keep a tight rein on it and make sure you maintain some control over it before it starts flying around the Internet out of control and without your expressed permission.

As mentioned in previous posts the most popular page on my other website is my page on career objectives, where people can submit theirs, have me critique it, and read career objectives submitted by other visitors, too.

The one thing I notice with about 95% of the submissions I get is that people tend to focus on what they want from the company (ie. better job, more responsibility, career advancement, education, etc) rather than focusing on what they offer the company which is the whole purpose of the career objective in the first place.

I respond to most people who put forth a decent effort (and I delete the one and two-word responses) and always tell people to focus on what they offer the hiring manager and company and to avoid discussing what they want…and yet I keep getting several submissions every day from people who are more concerned with what they want and not what they offer the company.

If you remember one thing about your resume it’s that the goal is to get you an interview. Read over your resume and ask if you’d want to interview yourself based on what you’ve written.

Writing a resume cover letter can be a difficult task for many people particularly if they’re not great writers, don’t know what to write, or simply misinterpret what the purpose of the cover letter is.

Full disclosure: I typically don’t even bother reading cover letters when I get one from a candidate applying for a job because I’m so used to reading form letters that often aren’t even updated for the specific job they’re applying for that they serve no real purpose. In other words, I’m so jaded and expect that the cover letter is going to suck, I other skim it quickly or don’t even bother reading it at all.

The purpose of the cover letter other than showing the potential hiring manager a sample of your written communication skills is to illustrate above and beyond your resume why they should interview you.

In other words, what do you have in your background that fits the job you’re applying or and why should they interview you over the dozens or hundreds of other candidates who have applied for the same job?

Typically though the cover letters I read are simply a copy and paste job of the person’s job description or are simply copied and pasted segments of their resume which doesn’t serve any purpose since then you’re just repeating a section of your resume twice.

There are many schools of thought as to what a resume cover letter should contain so rather than rehashing them, here’s a better idea.

If you’re open to checking out a resume cover letter resource that might help you write the cover letters you wished you could write, check out this interesting resource.

The purpose of the cover letter is to help you get the interview but you can’t do that unless your letter (and resume) gets read. This resource might just help you do that if you’re applying for jobs and not getting interviews.

On my other career website, my most popular page and topic related to the career objective. On this page, people can submit their career objective and get it critiqued by me and can read over the hundreds (and counting) of career objectives already submitted by other visitors.

Amazingly I can count on one hand the number of submissions I’ve received that I’d say would pique my interest enough to think about interviewing the person who wrote it if I was a hiring manager.

Most of the time, I’ll get a very generic submission that goes something like this:

Looking for a position with a dynamic company that offers me opportunities to move up within the company and utilize my strong communication skills and who believes in continuing education and training.

Basically it’s a statement that tells me virtually nothing about the person who wrote it and why the reader should interview them (which is the whole point of the career objective) and instead focuses on everything the person wants from the company.

I delete many of the submissions without posting them or critiquing them because are simply lazy attempts by people and aren’t worth reading. But many are ones that I’m sure are ones that are actually used in the person’s resume…and are ones that add nothing to their candidacy for a job.

Do you write your resume and your career objective in particular with your reader (ie. hiring manager) in mind or do you write it with no regard as to who is reading it or why?

I’m convinced that many people simply go through the motions with their resume and just write it because they have to and don’t pay a lot of attention to the purpose of the document ie. to convince the reader that they should interview them.

It also goes a long way I think to explain why people apply for job they aren’t qualified for, don’t manage their references properly, don’t prepare for interviews, etc. People are often lazy and go for quantity-over-quality and think that if they throw enough stuff against the wall something is bound to stick.

When you write your resume, review each statement and ask yourself “so what” until you can’t ask it anymore. Pretend you’re the hiring manager reading what you’ve written and ask yourself if you care about what you’ve just written.

Remember who your audience is (ie. who are you writing for) and remember that the people who tend to read your resume are those who can positively or negatively influence your job search and are typically searching to address a need or problem that they have ie. they need a new staff member.

How are you helping to address that need with what you’ve written?

I recently saw a copy of a professionally-written resume that was shown to me by the person who had paid to have it written for him. I’m not sure how much it cost but he did tell me “it cost me a lot to get it done” so I’ll take his word for it.

In a word, it looked fantastic. It gave me a great first impression…and that was before I’d even started reading it! It looked like it was written in some sort of template or perhaps was made into a PDF because the lettering was unlike anything you’d see in a regular Word document.

Each of the person’s previous jobs had a profile paragraph within a light colored blue box that really stood out from the page and caused my eyes to look right at the contents of the box. No doubt this was the goal and it worked.

As far as the writing of the resume itself, it was also very well done. The resume started off by showing in large bolded font lettering that the person’s career goal was a Key Account Manager position so right away I knew he was in sales even if I didn’t know anything else about him.

All in all, the design and actual written aspect of the resume was excellent. It simply stood out – for the right reasons – and demanded to be read. I suspect it would stand out from the many, many other resumes the average sales manager gets from sales professionals like this one.

Is paying someone to write – and in this case design – your resume a good idea? Depending on the cost and the skills of the person writing and designing it, the cost could certainly be worth it if it gets you in the front door of a company that eventually hires you.

Even if it simply accomplished the feat of getting you more interviews, that might be considered a success too.

On another website I run, I give visitors the opportunity to submit their own career objective to my site and have me (and other visitors to the site) critique it to help them improve it.

The topic “Career Objective” is by far the most popular topic on this website by the way… I’m not sure why but it is! If you’re interested, here is one of the most popular pages on the subject.

Today I received a submission from someone who sent me a very generic Career Objective and in the section where they can add their desired Job Title, they simply put “BBA.”

I have absolutely no idea what kind of job BBA is and I simply don’t have the desire to Google search it and try to figure it out and I suspect most people reading this guy’s resume won’t bother either. In other words, he’s already turned them off by using an acronym that some/many/most people don’t know the meaning of.

Using short forms should also be avoided especially in formal documents like cover letters and resumes. Last week, I received a Career Objective submission from a woman who referred to herself as a “Sr. Business Analyst” instead of “Senior Business Analyst.” Saving a couple of keystrokes and typing Sr. instead of Senior just doesn’t look good and really doesn’t serve any purpose. Spell it out properly in full.

In your resume, cover letter and other correspondence with people who can influence your career, watch out when using industry jargon that not everyone is familiar with. Remember that it could be an HR person, a recruiter or even someone in your chosen line of business reading your resume who doesn’t know the acronyms but can still have an important hand in deciding your fate. If you swamp them with acronyms, they may not bother wasting time figuring out what they mean.

When you’ve read as many resumes as recruiters do, you come across pretty much every possible style of resume and don’t get surprised when you see certain things after awhile. You get to read short one-page resumes all the way up to multi-page memoirs from people who didn’t get the memo that resumes tend to be 2 pages or 3 pages maximum in most cases.

One of the funny ways that people can stand out (and not for the right reasons) is by their use of fonts in their resume. Specifically, here are some things related to font usage in resumes (and cover letters for that matter) that I’ve seen over the years that stood out and how I interpreted it:

The use of outdated fonts like Courier: Is there a more outdated and lamer looking font than Courier? When I see a resume typed with Courier font, I’m immediately reminded of the old typewriters that I learned to type on back in high school in the mid 1980s. Why someone would use this font in a resume or cover letter, I have no idea. I immediately think “outdated” when I see it, it just looks so plain. Typically I’ll ask the person why they used this font and if they’d mind changing it to Times Roman size 12 or Arial size 10 which tend to the be two fonts that you can’t go wrong using.

The use of Comics font or other silly font: Comic font is probably good for your personal email if you think your friends will get a laugh and think that you’re funny (they probably won’t but that’s another story) but I’d steer clear of using it in a resume or cover letter. What’s the purpose of using a font like this? Will the reader think you have a sense of humor or that you’re just immature? The name Comic alone probably should give it away that it’s a font to be avoided in a job search document but I can certainly recall getting a few resumes that utilized it.

The use of multiple fonts: Quite often recruiters (and hiring managers presumably) get resumes and/or cover letters that start out using one font and then suddenly notice a second font making an appearance and causing the text to stand out like a sore thumb. Often, people mix and match the font size for no apparent reason within a paragraph of text. I’ve seen paragraphs that use size 12 font and then suddenly the next sentence switches to size 10 font in which appears to be a mistake that wasn’t caught. Certainly you can use different size fonts for section headings and things like that but not within the same paragraph for one apparent reason. Pick a nice font and font size like Times New Roman size 12 or Arial size 10 and stick with it.

The use of obscure fonts: Occasionally I’ve received resumes that I couldn’t even read because the person who sent it had used an obscure font that my computer didn’t even recognize. In each case, I’ll email them back and ask them to resend it using a popular font since if I can’t read the font, chances are other people including the hiring manager their resume would be getting to won’t be able to read it either.

We’ve already talked about resume writing and the truth is that many people aren’t that good at it. For some people, writing just isn’t their bag.

For others, it might be a language thing where your English skills aren’t great and/or you’re a bad speller who tends to make lots of grammatical errors, use run-on sentences, etc.

For others still, you might not realize how you write an effective resume and to design it in a way that makes people want to read it.

Ideally you want to write your own resume since on one knows you better than you. Or so one would expect.

The problem with resume writers is the same problem with anyone else you might considering hiring to do a job: Some are good. Some aren’t.

One of the newer ways that companies get you to use their resume writing services is by using the free resume critique offer. This is where you email them your resume and get one of their people to give you an honest assessment of your resume. So they aren’t going to rewrite your resume for free – they’re not a charity and aren’t doing this for their health – but you might think that they will offer up some great ideas that you can use to improve your resume.

Unfortunately that’s not the way it usually works. I offer a resume critique service on my Services page but it’s a paid service. What I’ll do is read over your resume and using my experience as a recruiter and someone who has read thousands of resumes and helped many people find new jobs, give you some advice based on the solid resumes that I’ve seen that have helped people get interviews that resulted in them getting jobs. I don’t claim to be a professional resume writer – I’m not – but if I can help a person improve their resume with some suggestions and tips, I’d like to help out.

With the companies that tend to offer the free resume critique, what it usually entails is you getting a generic and canned response from them that doesn’t actually tell you what to change in your resume but instead tells you all the things you’re doing wrong in your resume, in their opinion.

Essentially, it’s a pitch for you to pay for their paid resume writing services. In other words the goal of the free resume critique is to get you to buy a new resume from them.

You could send over the best resume ever written and they’ll still find a canned response to send you to convince you that you need their resume writing services.

As with other career-related scams, it’s the offer of a freebie that is actually masquerading as a sales pitch.

Last month I wrote a post about how some businesses – particularly career counseling type firms – offer you a free resume rewrite and when you end up getting the new resume, you find out that the new resume was based on a cookie-cutter format that every other one of their other clients also received, one that is possibly worse than the resume you wrote yourself that you were trying to improve upon.

As mentioned before, writing your resume yourself is your best bet but if you do need the help, make sure you use someone you trust who can supply you with free samples of their work and ideally, references you can speak with if you so desire.

The rule of the day relates to how companies acknowledge that they have received your resume. “We’ll keep your resume on file” (or words to that effect) is something that you tend to hear from an employer immediately after emailing your resume to them or sending your profile to them using their online application process.

Exactly what this means to you is another story.

In the old days before the Internet, it wasn’t uncommon to mail your resume to a company and two weeks later get a postcard or letter mailed back acknowledging that your resume had been received.

As email, instant messages and the like took over and began to replace actual hard copy correspondence – and as it became easier and cheaper for us to fire off hundreds of resumes by email rather than by mail – it became more difficult for companies to treat each submission individually.

So auto responder emails were created that would automatically trigger a generic response to the generally generic job submissions that many people send to various hiring managers around the world.

“We’ll keep your resume on file” is a polite way of saying that the recipient hasn’t yet gotten to reading your email given the hundreds or thousands of other emails that they have received for the same job you applied for and they don’t guarantee that they’ll actually get to reading your resume anytime in the near future.

Instead they will put it in their database for a period not to exceed 3, 6, 9 or 12 months or whatever their policy is and if you’re lucky, one of their HR reps might conduct a keyword search during that time that causes your resume to pop up on their screen most likely with hundreds or thousands of other candidates, too.

Bottom line, once your resume hits the company’s database, it’s sitting there with upwards of hundreds of thousands of other resumes and whether or not it gets read at a time when you’re actually looking for a new job or are in a position to consider one, is debatable.

Is dumbing down your resume a good idea? Specifically I’m referring to deliberately leaving out experience from your resume, taking out degrees and things of that nature to make it look like you have less experience and education so that you it looks more like you fit a job you’re interested in.

The first thing I’d ask is whether or not you’re even applying for a suitable job. If a job requires 3-5 years of experience and you have 10 years of experience, you’re not suitable for the job. Why would you be interested in a job that required half the experience you have?

Being desperate for a job is a typical reason why people dumb down their resume. Hands up the number of people who think that desperation is a good trait to show a potential hiring manager?

Recruiters often deal with this issue on a regular basis and a typical conversation with a desperate job searcher often goes like this:

Job searcher: I’m interested in applying for Job X.

Recruiter: Job X requires someone with 5 years of experience at most. The hiring manager told me they don’t want to see anyone with more than 5 years of experience. You have 10 years of experience.

Job searcher: Yeah, but I’m really interested in this job. What if I take some experience out of my resume and make it look like I have 5 years of experience?

I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve had conversations that are like this. I’ve also lost count of the number of interviews that I’ve set up for people where I know the interviewer will go over a person’s resume line by line, year by year and will very easily and quickly discover that the person is leaving out several or more years of experience from their resume. The years don’t just suddenly disappear from reality even if they’ve been removed from your resume!

Certainly there is nothing wrong with not drawing attention to experience that you have from many years ago. There is nothing wrong with having early career experience shown in your resume as something like Additional Experience: 1988-1994 without listing each job chronologically and instead concentrate on fully describing your most recent 15 years of experience, for example. This would be in the instance where you started your career over 20 years ago and choose to concentrate on the years 1995-present. This way you’re not leaving anything out, you’re simply alluding to your earliest experience and concentrating on the last 15 years. If an interviewer wants to ask you about the years 1988-1994 in more detail, they can.

Deliberately leaving out entire years of experience – I’ve seen plenty of people do this – immediately sets off alarm bells. What else are they hiding, I wonder…

When you meet someone who is clearly not in their twenties or thirties (ie. they’re older than that) and their resume only shows jobs from say 2000 onwards with no explanation as what they did on planet earth for the preceding 10-20 years, someone is going to wonder what you’re hiding.

Leaving out experience from your resume usually gets noticed and often raises more questions than would otherwise be raised had you simply made a brief mention of it as illustrated above.

Lies and deception tend to get caught and when it happens, you’ve usually burned a bridge as a result.