Don't be afraid to show the competition on your resume don't just tell me that you want a prize
Tell me about how many people compete it and don't just tell me that you've got accepted into a program or a university
Tell me that there's only nine percent acceptance rate
Hey Badasses, welcome back to Badass Careers
Which is the YouTube channel all about helping you build a career and life. You love pretty sweet, right?
So I did a video about the biggest resume mistakes that I've seen in over 10 years in HR and recruitment
And that I really don't want you making any more and you guys seem to love it
So this is part two to that because there are heaps of resume mistakes that you can make
I want to tell you all about them so that you don't get caught out making them and losing your chance
Of impressing recruiters and hiring managers and landing those awesome job interviews. So without further ado
Let's just jump straight into it and let's unpack some of the biggest resume mistakes that you might be making
so the first resume mistake is
Undervaluing the importance of the formatting the look and the design of your resume
And I know I touched on it a little bit in the last video in terms of formatting
but it's really important that you will show them the level of
excellence that you're willing to put into the role because the resume of a person worth
$100,000 per year and the resume of a person worth
$40,000 a year may look quite different and I just want to ask you
concretely
Like which resume if you know that recruiters have just 6 seconds to skim your resume and decide whether or not they're gonna bother
Interview or not. Would you rather meet just on first impressions alone this person?
or this person
Know, the format's not everything the content is king. That's the most important thing
It has to have substance
But if you can have the both that's a winning resume and if you set up a resume
Strategically enough it actually builds your confidence and prepares you for a really positive salary negotiation round as well
I also got a lot of questions under the last resume video which was around formatting
How long does it need to be so big mistake here would be having a resume
That's inappropriate long and just goes on and on and full of fluff and waffle and details that I didn't need to know
Not to make this initial decision to interview once we're in the interview. You can tell me your life story
But I don't need to know in your resume
So my golden rule is basically if you've got 10 years experience or less your resume should not be longer than one page
Because you should be able to communicate succinctly and pitch yourself and market in relation to that role
They don't need to know every single little thing you've ever achieved you've ever done in your life
It's for that role and then if you have 20 years experience on this
I'm sure you could get it down to two pages. In fact, I challenge you to for the next Thursday
I want to talk about is not leveraging your experience and what you've done and what you've achieved to the requirements of the job
So a lot of us have quite a wide background, we studied loads of different things
We've had different experiences often internships entry-level roles lots and lots of different things that we could talk about
but what will make you stand out is making sure that you completely
Tailor this resume this marketing pitch to what they need to know and what they're looking for
so what I recommend is having almost a bank of
your job title the dates you work there what you did and your key achievements from that role in a spreadsheet or something behind the
Scenes and then for each tailored resume application that you're going to go for you just pick out the bits
That would be really really relevant to this particular job description. This is because and I'm going to give you an example
Imagine you're currently working in a retail
position where you often interact with customers and you have to do the cash handling and deal with the
Transactions and take the cash down to the bank afterwards and open and close the store and all of that kind of stuff
But you want to apply for a role as a tour guide now as a tour guide
What's going to be the most important thing to know about you?
It's that you have experience working with customers building relationships
you want an Employee of the Month award because of your excellent service skills that stuff interesting the cash handing the
responsibility for locking and unlocking the store at least so
So you take that part of the experience and that goes on your CV for this tour-guide
position. Sad to say but a lot of recruiters just skim as well the first
bullet point or maybe two under each experience section
I'm not saying the hiring manager won't read your resume in totality, but just keep that in mind as well
But if you're there just skimming one point under each job title
What do you want them to know about you and recruiters aren't bad people by the way that they'd receive
Overwhelming amounts of applications for each open job. They reckon recruiters get 300 applicants on average for each open job
They're managing often managing several at a time. But if you were working somewhere like Google they can get
7,000 applications for a single role
So this is crazy the next big resume mistake that I don't want you making is using eye candy graphics
So infographic style and that kind of thing. There are some exceptions to this
but basically I know that there's some cool resume templates floating around up there and they use like circle graphs and bars and
icons and all that kind of stuff so you can use that absolutely to enhance the design and I'm a big fan of that but
That kind of stuff can't be read by the ATS by the applicant tracking system
Which is the robotic?
algorithm that CVS and resumes are going through and being scared to see whether the recruiter is even going to look at your resume or
Not or are you just going to receive one of those automatic rejection emails? Because the applicant tracking system cannot read graphics
It needs
Text it can also make a recruiter a little bit skeptical because if you say these are your skills and you've got different bar links
Say so I mean a recruit as reaction might just be like, okay, we'll prove it. You know, what does that mean?
What does it mean to have an almost full bar and then half a bar? It's completely subjective
You don't know the scale and it can come across as a little bit fluffy to be honest
So if you do want to highlight specific skills that you really have
What I absolutely recommend is having a little section which is key skills or strengths having the header and having a bullet point
Proving that so not just claiming it but having a proof point an example a number
something that you can use to back up your claim and
Having three of those for example that you want to highlight on your resume that works really well
the next point is very much linked to what I was talking about before but the mistake is putting every
Single thing that you've ever done in your life on your resume
So way way way back to very first internships and things like that again
You don't have to put every single thing on your resume that you've ever done in your life
You can call the section career highlights
but you don't need to go on and on about
Irrelevant experiences as it's all about optimizing every centimeter of this marketing document and making the real estate count likewise
Don't be afraid to leave some things off. Irrelevant certifications, software, languages
If it's not going to be useful. Again, we know as a person and our life in our experiences in our skills
It's more like this, right?
we've got lots and lots of different things going on and things that we could pick from but what I want you to do is
Really pick from them and sort of make it very concise and obvious and telling the story. Okay can do this job. Boom?
It's also really important because your resume should be crafted about what you want to do in the future
Not everything you've done in the past
So if you can pick out the key skills key competencies key
Experiences that build up and tell the story to you apply for the job that you're currently applying for
It's gonna play much more in your favor than anchoring you in past positions and maybe sometimes lower-level
Responsibilities that you don't necessarily want to be associated with anymore
This mistake is pretty unforgivable given that you're trying to pitch for an opportunity with tens of thousands of dollars
If not hundreds of thousands of dollars of salary in any given year and that is having typos and grammatical errors
So not only do you need to write the document
Walk away leave it for half a day and come back with fresh eyes and proofread it
But you need to ask at least one external person to proofread it for you
I highly encourage getting Grammarly
Which is a Google Chrome extension
Which gives you tips and suggestions about the structure of your sentences and it also pro frees for you
Absolutely recommend getting that make sure you completely escape from any
Distractions and sit there with your resume in front of you and read it out loud
Word by word and what you can even do so it's not too much for your brain as hold a sheet of paper up to
The screen and just go through it section by section
Hiding what you're not currently reading with the sheet of paper
So that you can really zoom in and focus on the section that you're currently reading. another huge mistake is around
consistency
So this is a major one
It's really really important that what you have on your resume and on your LinkedIn profile because that's the natural next step for recruiters
Matches. So dates match and they absolutely should because you should never be lying anyway on your resume
But I know sometimes people
Will tweak a job title so that it's more favorable and and things which are absolutely in the realm of being okay to do
But they don't follow through on their LinkedIn and the recruiters like hmm. What's going on here?
Another huge mistake is not showing the competition. So
How impressed would you be if I told you I got into my master's program and international human resource management at?
La Sorbonne in Paris
Okay, cool. It's pretty impressive. Right? I mean, I'm really happy that I did that and it's a good achievement
But what if I told you that they received close to a thousand applications from all around the world?
Getting for just 20 places and I got one of those it suddenly way more impressive, right?
So don't be afraid to show the competition on your resume
Don't just tell me that you want a prize tell me about how many people competed and don't just tell me that you got
accepted into a program or a university tell me that there's only nine percent acceptance rate again companies want to hire high achievers and
This provides social proof which by the way is one of the most powerful forms of influence that many people tried
but you are one of the few that succeeded and very much linked to the previous point is not
Associating yourself to the big brands that you can claim
so maybe you are a key account manager in France and you are managing to known and L'Oreal and
Chanel and Hermese and all of these amazing brands
but if you don't mention that I'm not gonna
Associate you with that kind of level of bread
One of the major principles of influence is all around the authority and when you associate yourself think about who your clients have been
What projects you've worked on, where ultimately ended up. All these kinds of things?
Are there any big names that you could somehow associate yourself with?
Because that could help to lift your influence game tenfold. Some examples from my clients
I actually had a client who was working back in India as a fashion designer and she was working for brands like
Topshop, Wrangler, H&M, Zara
really big brands
so by putting those on her CV it takes her from "Okay, working as a fashion designer in India" to "I was working as a
Fashion designer for global brands" or if you're creating social media videos at L'Oreal for example
And you worked with Emma Watson you could say on your resume
I created a video with Emma Watson which reached 60,000 views another one of my clients as a Yale student
And she wanted to introduce a fashion speaker series to Yale something that didn't exist and she was able to get amazing
People from the fashion industry to show up in her speaker series
And she was able to talk about these people and named them on her resume again
It lifts your level of authority and influence by associating yourself with
successful people
Brands companies all of that good stuff one bonus tip here is if you're currently a student
You can do this by becoming a campus ambassador
Volunteering for a notable company maybe writing a master's thesis and pitching it to some notable companies to collaborate with you
So you'll help them to solve one of their business problems and you'll basically write your thesis for them with them in mind
There's loads of ways that you can start
Associating yourselves with notable names and companies another mistake that we don't really think about in this day and age
But it's not bringing copies of your resume with you to the interview
It always helps to have you know
5 copies just printed out that you can refer to and you can give to your
Interviewers as well and the last mistake that I'll leave you with is not following up
so just submitting the resume and not contacting the recruiter and/or the hiring manager on LinkedIn or via email and
Basically following up to have a second chance of that resume being seen so guys
I hope that you found that interesting and really useful and that these resume mistakes will be a thing of the past for you and
If you're the kind of person that gives a shiz about your career and you want it to be really successful and fulfilling
Without the overwhelm and without the burnout then you're in the right place
Hit subscribe, and I'll be coming at you with new content every single week on the baddest careers YouTube channel
And don't forget to grab your free be the killer resume cheat sheet, which is down in my description box down below
Until then, Stay Badass, and I'll see you guys next time. Bye