A Kick In The Career: Let’s See Your C.V.

There are lots of things you can do to improve your life. Give up fatty foods, for example, or get more exercise. Take a meditation or yoga class. (But why is the so-called downward facing dog pose so popular in the stately and dignified discipline of yoga? Not exactly a power position for the next interview.)

And there is always one thing you can do to improve your economic outlook: make sure your resume is up to snuff.  Reviewing your accomplishments can be a self-affirming experience. It can psych you up for diving into the job market.  So instead of binge watching American Horror Story when you should be trolling LinkedIn, you can make sure your resume sparkles by avoiding a few key mistakes. Here’s how:

EIGHT MISTAKES I ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT MAKE ON MY RESUME 

1.     Forget to spell check. You really don’t want a prospective employer to see that you worked for the professional services firm of Delight & Tush, do you?

2.     Use a funky font. Your new maybe boss has thousands of these things to go through. The last thing he or she needs is to try and figure out how to read your name in Brush Script.

3.     Include irreverent, irrelevant personal interests. If you are applying for an aerospace job, you are within your rights to include the fact that you are a weekend pilot. But if you are applying for a job with an accounting firm, you needn’t mention your stint as Gandalf at the Renaissance Faire.

4.     Use buzzwords instead of emphasizing performance. If you increased productivity at your last job by fifty percent, say so. Nobody cares that you were “part of an aggressive, team-centered workforce.”

5.     Forget to customize your objective. That statement about wanting to carve out a niche as someone who is admired for taking on sacred cows is okay for the sales job. But when you don’t bother to change it for the job at the slaughterhouse, well, don’t blame them for being confused.

6.     Fashion a ‘clever’ standout resume. Unless you are applying for a job as a designer for a shooter game, please don’t include any DVDs with your resume. And no, your funny hanging mobile made from the logos of your last six companies will not go over well.

7.     Fail to demonstrate why they need you. If the job listing asks for one set of skills, and the key words in your resume match a total of none of them, perhaps you will be joining your friends in the shredder.

8.     Be all over the place. Your resume should demonstrate an easily identifiable progression of your job history; it should tell a compelling story in a simple way. Your employer wants to spend a few minutes with Steven Spielberg, not David Lynch.

So get out there and curriculum up your vitae. And a little yoga probably wouldn’t hurt either.