While not all bad resumes look alike, some common qualities of bad resume examples are being messy or disorganized layouts, too long and complicated language, unprofessional fonts, or just plain uninspiring and unimpactful content. And, making it necessary to improve your resume.
There are countless ways to format a resume. The reality is that it depends on the situation – what kind of experience you have and what position, audience, or country you are targeting.
Recruiters are likely to pass on resumes that don’t get to the point or are all over the place. Having so many resumes to review, if they can’t understand yours, they won’t spend an hour figuring it out first.
Here are some do’s and don’ts
✔️Rather than providing a long description of your experience and then listing your positions separately at the bottom, separate your experience by positions and accomplishments.
✔️There is a fine line and absolutely such a thing as too much information, so don’t elaborate on each position excessively.
✔️After a few years of experience, the one-page rule may no longer apply, but if you limit yourself to one page, they won’t be able to learn enough about your work, stick to a 2-page limit as anything more is rather lengthy and redundant.
✔️Do not list every single technology, tool, or methodology you have heard of. List the ones you have experience with and would be comfortable using every day along with potential ones that the next role is seeking. Make them easy to find for non-technical people (HR) by organizing them under short headers.
✔️You may think tables are a great way to organize your resume, but they look too busy and unclean, and the ATS can’t read through them.
✔️Make sure your document works on other computers. I’ve opened resumes with wingdings or overlapping text. They’re tossed. Send it to a friend to see if they can open it.
✔️Don’t jumble up your positions and lines, space them out and make navigation easy.
✔️Use bullets. If your resume is a novel with paragraphs trust me nobody will read it.
✔️Getting noticed requires a clean, easy-to-navigate resume. It is likely that strong candidates are passed over because of their ridiculous resume format. Keep it simple while adding impactful content.
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