Jeremy Johnson has a new guest blog post this week on red flags that recruiters, like him, look for on a resume.
Jeremy is a recruiter in Kansas City for EHD Technologies, a recruiting, staffing and managed services company serving the IT, Engineering and Automotive industries.
Resume Red Flags
As a recruiter, I look at dozens of resumes every day. Many are good, a lot more are bad, and occasionally, I’ll see some that are just flat-out bizarre. But, oftentimes the bad ones have a lot in common. And a recruiter’s radar is finely tuned through experience to pick up on those resume negatives that we call red flags. Recruiters, HR personnel and hiring managers are all searching for these things because, in all honesty, we’re probably more looking for a reason to discard your resume than we are looking for a reason to call you. Please don’t take it personally. For us, it’s just an occupational hazard.
Sourcing and reviewing resumes isn’t rocket science, but it is extremely time consuming. And when you have to get through so many resumes in a day, you have to make quick decisions, and you also can’t call every single person whose resume you review. There’s just not enough time, and time is our biggest challenge. So, we won’t spend much of that precious time with what looks to us like we’ll be wasting it.
So, just as we’re looking for the right background and experience on a resume, we’re also looking for those red flags that more likely indicate you’re a risk to put in a job. Those things we see that make bells and sirens go off and a little voice in our heads says, “Don’t make that call! It’ll just bite you in the backside!” That’s what we’re thinking, and we’ve all had a candidate whose resume gave us that bad feeling, who we took a flyer on anyway and then got burned by it. If you’re in recruiting, HR, or a hiring position long enough, it will happen. And when it does, we listen in the future to that nagging feeling that those red flags give us.
You can’t afford to not take these things seriously, and you also can’t afford to not look at your resume from the perspective (and fears) of your audience. What may not seem like a big deal to you, may verywell be a huge red flag for the person reviewing your resume and could keep you from getting a job you want and are qualified for.
Here is a list of some common red flags I see, and how folks on my side interpret them:
Typos: You’ve heard this one before. I know, I know. You don’t need to hear it; I’m preaching to the choir. Then why do I still see this so often!?! It absolutely floors me how professionals, especially those in technical disciplines, can still have typos on their resumes. I think the main reason this happens is just familiarity. You’re just too close to your own resume and it becomes easy to overlook. What you need is a fresh set of eyes, as they will usually pick up things that you might miss. Get a friend or family member to proofread your resume. You may have heard that typos tell your audience that you’re careless or you lack attention to detail, and I think that can be true. For me personally, it mainly just makes me think that you don’t take the whole process seriously. If you’re serious, you’ll be conscious about doing things right, and that means you’ll care about not making mistakes on your resume and will actively take steps to avoid it. Lack of seriousness then is a pervasive issue. It’s not about the typos; it’s about what the typos say about the person making them. Don’t let something so easy to correct derail you in your job hunt.
No employment dates listed: If you list all of your jobs, the companies, locations and duties, but don’t list the dates of employment, we immediately suspect that you’re hiding something. And most of the time we check into it, we’re proven right. The higher the person’s level of expertise, the less I generally see this problem. If you’re trying to hide employment dates on your resume – don’t. You can’t make us not concerned about your job stability or longevity by omitting information. We’re looking for this sort of stuff. All we’re going to think is that you feel you have a good reason to not be upfront – and that reason is never a good one. I simply will not call a person who doesn’t list employment dates on their resume.
Big gaps between employment: I’ve had coworkers who recruited on skill sets where if a typical candidate had a 3-5 year gap in their resume, it often meant prison. That doesn’t mean that we think anyone with a three-year gap was in trouble with the law, but it does have us think SOMETHING bad must be going on, and that it probably makes you a risk to employ. This can be a tough issue to deal with on a resume, and I don’t think there’s just one sure-fire way to handle it; but, I’m more inclined to advise against making us guess what was going on during those times, at least if the gaps are within the past 5-10 years. For me, gaps older than that begin to lose their sting. But, just because YOU don’t address those gaps – especially recent ones — doesn’t mean we’ll ignore it. Trust me, we’ll use our experience to fill in the blanks with possibilities. You have to be able to defend those gaps in a credible way, or you risk scaring off your target audience.
A lot of short-term jobs: This speaks to job stability. I understand that sometimes this isn’t due to any fault of your own. It could be a string of bad luck, or maybe you needed to take a series of temporary positions to make ends meet. If this is the case, you need to give a brief explanation, even if it’s just a short phrase in parentheses, by each job. For example, if a job was a temporary or contract position, say so. If you don’t, all we can assume is that since you haven’t lasted at any job, you won’t last in ours, either. Maybe it’s because you’re good at overselling your skills but can’t really do the job once it starts. Maybe you don’t play nice in the sandbox and burn bridges everywhere you go. Maybe you’re just the nomadic type and get that itch if you stay in one place too long. Whatever it is, the bottom line is that your history tells us we can’t count on you for very long, and our experience tells us that whatever the reason you move around, it’s not a good one, and it’s best for us not to risk it.
The resume is a novel: Unless you’re in academic research, where it’s common to have a 20+ page Curriculum Vitae (CV), your resume shouldn’t be more than three pages. The resume isn’t meant to be a dissertation. It’s not even necessarily a compendium of your entire career. It’s a marketing piece. That’s it. It’s supposed to give your audience enough targeted information to see if they should pick up the phone and call you. The worst thing for me, as a recruiter, is to open up a resume that’s 5-7 pages of solid text. Ugh. The last thing your audience should have to do is spend 20 minutes trying to figure you out. My theory about why people take the “resume novel” approach is they think that by providing gobs of information, they’re leaving nothing to chance and we’ll be able to sift through it all, pick out what’s relevant and still give you a call. The problem is, that’s not how I interpret a “resume novel” at all. Though someone may be good at providing detailed technical information, that’s not the most important thing on a resume. I’ve coined a phrase around this idea: “They’re really good at telling me what they’ve done, but they’re really bad about telling me why I should care.” And in a job hunt, it’s all about why you’re the right fit. A person who can’t summarize the “so what” factor of their experience is going to be hard to work with on the phone, hard to know exactly how to “sell” as a candidate, and who probably won’t effectively and concisely communicate in an interview why they’re the right solution to that company’s particular need – and I’ll have to re-recruit to find a replacement candidate.
Functional resume format: If you’re not familiar with the term functional resume, it’s a formatting style that emphasizes your skill sets, rather than on your job history. What it looks like then is a large section that separates your various professional expertise under their own headers explaining your skills in those areas. The job history then is nothing more than a short list of your job titles and employers (hopefully with dates) but absolutely zero description of what you did. Here’s an example of the problem it creates for us. Sure, it looks like you have manufacturing machine design experience, but was it 15 years ago? Was it for only one month? The functional format tells me what you’ve done, but it tells me nothing about when, for how long, or in what context. It feels like you’re trying to hide something. And if you’re intentionally holding back that information, I’m going to wonder why, and if I do call, I’m probably going to have trouble pulling out the details I need in order to confidently tell my clients this is the person they’re looking for. All of this makes me wonder if it’s a mistake to call at all.
Wrongly targeted objective or summary statement: If your objective statement (which I don’t like, by the way, but that’s a topic for another blog) says you’re looking for a permanent position as a Network Engineer and you’ve just applied to my posting for a contract Desktop Support job, you’re not getting a call. Maybe you weren’t actually interested in that job but were more just trying to get visibility for yourself with an employer or recruiter. Maybe you’re hoping it results in a phone call for other IT opportunities that better fit you. I get it. It does happen and sometimes you’ll get a call. But, you’re making a dangerous assumption here: you’re assuming that we’ll read the rest of the resume when the very first thing you tell us about yourself is that you don’t bother paying attention to what you apply for. To me, it feels sloppy, passive and careless and the question it makes me ask is, “Do I want to put a sloppy and careless person in front of my clients?” It also tells us that more than likely, you’re sending out the identical resume for countless positions and when we call we’ll have to re-explain the position because you’ll have no idea which one we’re even talking about. It doesn’t happen to me much anymore because experience has told me to not bother calling these types of candidates; I’ll just be walking into a mess.