Finding a good job often becomes a long and tiring process that requires a lot of patience and skills. It all starts with creating a resume and helping it stand out from the rest. However, inexperienced applicants often make common mistakes while working on their CV that can eventually lower their chances of landing a great job. Find out what to remove from your resume and what to never put on it again.
Objective
A lot of resume templates include an objective field at the top of the page, but in most cases it’s completely unnecessary. Plus, if you choose to include an objective that is too ambitious, for example, to become the next Bill Gates, it can make you look arrogant and will likely hurt your hiring chances. The only exception is when you want to radically switch professions – in this case you can use the objective to explain your choice and intentions.
Personal information
In the past job seekers were required to include information like marital status, number of children, and religious preferences, into their resumes. However, those times are gone, and now not only you don’t have to state your personal information, but it’s also often illegal for the employee to ask you for this data. You can skip these fields in your resume and include only the information you find to be relevant.
Irrelevant job experience
If you don’t have a lot of work experience and don’t want your CV to look empty, it’s always tempting to include the time when you babysat your neighbours’ kids or when you work as a bartender while attending university. Nevertheless, in most cases this experience doesn’t add anything to your professional profile and won’t have any positive impact on your prospects.
Lies
This is another case of an applicant who doesn’t have enough skills and experience to put on the resume and chooses to include complete lies. Applicants lie about their education, skills, work experience, and lots of other things. However, you need to know that a skilled HR manager will always spot a lie, and even when he can’t notice a lie right away, he can always check the info you provided, which means the lies will always backfire.
Too much text
Most job seekers already know that the ideal resume size is one Word page, but some applicants try to outsmart the system by putting too much information on their CVs and then simply using a smaller font and narrower margins. When you’ve completed your resume, take a good look at the text and honestly answer the question: does the text look too crowded? If the answer is yes, then you’d better edit the text and delete the information that is not essential.
Hobbies
You may think that information about your tastes and hobbies in the CV will help you stand out from the crowd, but in reality this information is far from relevant and won’t have a positive influence in the hiring process. This information takes up a lot of valuable space in your CV and can actually waste the HR manager’s time, which is never your desired effect. You can share your thoughts on hobbies with your co-workers once you already land a job.
References
This is another thing that was required in the past but is completely unnecessary now. Remember: if the HR manager of the company you’re interviewing for wants to speak with your former employees, he will ask you directly. Otherwise, this information is irrelevant on your CV. However, it’s a good idea to have a couple of reference contacts at hand, but make sure to warn your references that they might get a call from the HR manager.
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