Andy Padian’s Top Ten Ways to Make Your Resume Suck

February 10, 2012

  Top ten ways to make your resume suck
Through Andy’s work with Green Career Transitions, Andy is beginning to understand that many of your struggles in getting a job revolve around your resume, which honestly, can suck, and not reflect how competent you are.   10. Call the file “Resume” and don’t put your name on it so we can’t distinguish it from 30 others.   9. Make it an editable doc file (not pdf), so people can mess with it and send it out to others as a joke resume.   8. List your education above your experience, for if you’re more impressed with where you went to school than your real world experience, we will be too, and we won’t hire you.   7. Make it with a boring typeface with huge white margins, so it looks like you’re trying to “pad” your experience rather than explaining it in greater detail, and make it three pages long with lots of white space.   6. Don’t use spell check, and god forbid, don’t let anyone else pre-read it for spelling and grammar mistakes.   5. Don’t summarize your career and/or aspirations in the beginning to set the stage for who you are and want to be.   4. Give twenty bullet points about each of your jobs, rather than quickly summarizing your responsibilities and then putting a small number of bullets to highlight your experience.   3. Don’t use action verbs like administered, managed, supervised, budgeted, organized, or prioritized, making us think you just went to meetings, wrote memos, and played Bejeweled.   2. Make your resume read like an obit, rather than an advertisement for how bright, creative, and likable you are.   ….and the number one way to make your resume suck:   1. Make sure you show huge gaps in employment and list your hobby as world traveling, so we know you’ll be gone in 6 months.