Five Easy Ways To Improve Your Resume

CareerBuilder offers five ways to improve your resume. Items one and three are what strike me as being among the most obvious and most important.
1. Spell check... the old-fashioned way.

3. Simplify your language.
I can only speak for myself but I am consistently surprised to see terrible, egregious spelling mistakes on important documents. Screw up on a resume and kiss the opportunity goodbye.

Item number three is something that strikes me too. If you have a minimal command of the language you can make simple tasks appear to be very complex. That is fine if you are trying to fill a bluebook, but it is a hurdle for getting a job.

People don't want to waste time trying to figure out what you did. They are far too busy. You'll be more successful in your search if you make it easier to understand what your responsibilities and accomplishments are/were.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, no kidding. I had a business writing resumes for fifteen years, and I lost sleep over spell checking. Just one slipup on the word "public" and my client and I would both be finished. I taught clients to proofread from right to left and bottom up, since the piece wouldn't make sense from that point of view and they'd be less likely to skim over mistakes.

Jack Steiner said...

Fee,

That is an excellent method of proofreading.

Michael said...

Jack, you said: If you have a minimal command of the language you can make simple tasks appear to be very complex.

Quite right. And if you have a maximal command of language, you can make complex tasks appear simple.

Deadman said...

Regarding blog posts - (a bit off-topic)

I wish more people would proofread and UNDERSTAND what they are looking for in the first place. We all make the odd typo, but when I see people making the same errors consistently it tells me they don't know in the first place:

its - it's.

would of instead of would have.

your - you're.

Ad nauseum.

Jack Steiner said...

Michael,

Exactly.

Mark,

I hear you.

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