In the News
Ask Annie: 6 Resume Mistakes to Beware Of
Fortune
05.17.2004
By Annie Fisher
Ready to get your first “real” job? Great, because employers are ready for you too-or at least likely to be more welcoming than they were last year. Companies will be hiring 12% more newly minted college grads than in 2003, according to a survey by job site CollegeGrad.com (http://www.collegegrad.com/). The No. 1 hirer of entry-level people this year is Enterprise Rent-a-Car, which says it plans to take on 6,500 people. Others on CollegeGrad.com’s list: Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Geico Direct, and Farmers Insurance Group. If you live in the South, or are willing to move there, you may have a bit of an edge. Another survey of companies’ entry-level recruiting plans, this one by CareerBuilder.com (http://www.careerbuilder.com/), says that 33% of hiring managers looking for new grads are below the Mason-Dixon line, while 25% are in the Midwest, 24% in the West, and just 18% in the Northeast.
Brad Karsh, CEO of JobBound (http://www.jobbound.com/), a site specifically for students and those fresh out of college, has seen thousands of neophyte resumes, and he says that most of them contain at least one (and sometimes several) of the following flaws. Does yours?
Job description vs. job accomplishment. “This is the mistake virtually every new grad makes,” Karsh says. “He or she simply describes what anyone in the position-whether it was an internship, a part-time job, or an extracurricular role-did, rather than telling about his or her own particular achievements. If what you have written on your resume could just as well have been written by the person who had the job before or after you, then you haven’t done yourself justice.” Go ahead, brag a little.
Strict chronological listings. “Recruiting directors skim over a resume in 10 or 15 seconds,” Karsh notes. “They look at the first experience listed and decide whether to keep going.” So if you worked at McDonald’s in the summer of 2001 and as a financial-analyst intern at Goldman Sachs in 2002, here’s a tip: Put the Goldman Sachs job first. Likewise, be sure to list the most important information left to right. “Often, a new grad will write something like, ‘Fall 2003, Alpha Tau Omega (social fraternity), President,’ “ says Karsh.” The hiring manager may not make it to the word ‘President.’ So instead, write, ‘President, Alpha Tau Omega (social fraternity), Fall 2003.’ “
Fluffy objectives. If you must include an objective, Karsh recommends keeping it very specific. “Write ‘To obtain a position in the marketing department at Coca-Cola,’” he says. Stuff like ‘To use my outstanding communications skills to advance through a multinational corporation’ is just wasted time and space. Anyone can write that.”
Computer skills. “Every student and new grad includes them, but is it really necessary to do so? For some jobs, yes, but not for all,” says Karsh. “If the job description specifies certain skills, then list those. But at this point, putting down that you know how to use Microsoft Word is like writing that you know how to dial a phone.”
Gimmicks, fancy paper, odd layouts. No, no, no. “A laminated resume shaped like a menu just tells the recruiter there isn’t a lot of substance in the content,” says Karsh. And please, no multipage resumes. “You need to keep it to one page.”
Errors in grammar or spelling. ‘“You may as well just drop it in the garbage, because recruiters will,” Karsh says. “Simply no excuse!” Yikes. If you’re not sure you’ve parsed and spelled everything correctly, show your resume to someone who can spot where you may have gone wrong. Don’t rely on spell-check: It doesn’t know many proper names and can’t identify homonyms. Good luck! Happy hunting! And hey-congratulations! Send questions to askannie@fortunemail.com.
