How to write a résumé I’ll like: some typical mistakes and tips from a potential employer

The main thing: put more per­sonal infor­ma­tion in your résumé!

I’m saying this as an employer (not a typ­i­cal one, prob­a­bly, but still). I recently went through quite a lot of résumés while look­ing for a new employee and decided to pub­lish a few tips, in case they help someone.

Typical short­com­ings of résumés:

1. Too little information. Even if you have no work expe­ri­ence, you surely did some part-time work while study­ing: write about it, that’s useful infor­ma­tion too. Many people at some point did some “social” or orga­niz­ing work at uni­ver­sity or school: at least write about that.
2. Mistakes. I came across résumés with the name of the uni­ver­sity mis­spelled; simple typos are one thing, but I often found plain gram­mar and spelling mistakes. For some reason I don’t feel like hiring a person like that.
3. Say what kind of job you’re look­ing for. A good employer will be inter­ested; dull bores will be put off.
4. If you don’t know what job you’re look­ing for, say what kind of work you like doing: what you find boring and what you find interesting.
5. Say what you can do. For exam­ple, my employee’s line at the inter­view, “I rein­stalled Windows myself”, quickly set­tled my doubts about whether she got on with computers. (The posi­tion was client account man­ager, not sysad­min, of course.)
6. Don’t copy the same phrases about being a quick learner and disciplined. The employer (or the HR person) isn’t a fool and looks at more than one résumé a day, and all those per­sonal qual­i­ties look identical. For me these phrases aren’t even empty: they’re a minus on the can­di­date’s imag­i­nary scorecard.
7. No links to your social net­work profiles. You think that’s your pri­vate busi­ness? Maybe so, but I checked the pro­files of the people who sent résumés anyway, and drew conclusions. Since they’ll most likely look you up anyway, make the HR person happy at this stage already. If you’re ashamed to show your VKontakte page, hide your infor­ma­tion from strangers, and don’t forget that albums need hiding too: it’s very easy to put “albums” next to a user’s id in the address ;)

General rules:

• don’t be afraid of seem­ing naive or out of place: that’s better than seem­ing dumb and boring;
• a cre­atively made résumé has a con­crete ben­e­fit even if you’re look­ing for a job as, say, an assis­tant accoun­tant: cre­ative résumés are at least more mem­o­rable and stand out from the tons of sim­i­lar ones.

For exam­ple, one girl put together her résumé as a table on a land­scape sheet, with a photo and detailed descriptions. As a result I invited her for a trial period, but it turned out she had already found a job: clearly I wasn’t the only one who appre­ci­ated her résumé.

A résumé is a first impres­sion, and it can also be the last one. Make an effort, and you’ll get a pile of inter­view invitations.