Don’t make these mistakes on your resume and cover letter

When you are competing in the job market, you don’t necessarily need to be the best qualified, you need to LOOK at the best qualified, in order to prove it in the interview. Mistakes on your resume and cover letter can automatically get you disqualified before HR has even considered your qualifications. (This happened to a friend of mine, she was at the interview when they spotted a spelling mistake in the resume, and that was the end of the interview.)

This is what you need to know.

1. Have people you trust check your resume and cover letter for typos, misspellings, and other mistakes. Don’t rely on the spell checker or other computer programs to catch everything, because they won’t.

2. When capitalizing words, remember to only capitalize proper nouns (Paris, Microsoft, Stratocaster, instead of city, software, electric guitar), beginning of sentences, and titles (but not short prepositions or a / aa unless they are the first word.

Examples: A walk to remember, Tale of two cities, The spring, When in Rome, Insomnia in Seattle, Of mice and men

3. Make sure your bullets “match.”

For example

• Managed budgets of up to $ 100,000
• Supervised up to 50 staff members

Not

• Managed budgets of up to $ 100,000
• Supervision up to 50 staff members.

Since “administered” is a verb in the past tense, all first words must be verbs in the past tense. “Supervision” is a noun and therefore does not match. Also note the period at the end of the last bullet. Whether you choose to put periods at the end of your bullets is up to you, however choose one and stick with it throughout the resume. Also, bullets do not have to be complete sentences. And be careful with the number of bullets. If you only have one or two, make it a normal, non-bulleted sentence. If you have more than five, try combining a pair and removing extra words. Aim for three to five.

3. Use a professional email address, something that reflects your name. Skip “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. “[email protected], or jdoe, or jane.doe27 (if there are many Jane Doe type addresses). Use that address for everything related to work.

4. Do not include anything on your resume that indicates something that could be used to illegally discriminate: age (so if you graduated from college in 1969, you may want to leave the date), race, ethnicity (member of the Italian American Association Association), sexual orientation or disability.

5. Do not put your references on your resume (for your privacy). You don’t even need to include the line “References available on request”. It’s superfluous – everyone has references, and employers are already planning to ask for them once they interview you.