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Ten Easy Searches to Improve Your Resume

Word’s search feature can help you improve your resume by searching for the most common mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. This check is a vital step in making sure your resume is error-free. In response to a CareerBuilder survey, 58% of hiring managers and recruiters refused to read a resume with typos, immediately dismissing those candidates from any consideration for the job.

The following 10 easy searches will help track down typos on your resume.

  1. Search for “lead”—if the job is in the past, the word you want is “led.”
  2. Search for double spaces. After a period, you only need a single space.
  3. Search for a period outside the quotes (”.) In U.S. English, the period normally goes inside the quotes (.”).
  4. Search for the dollar sign ($). Make sure you are always referring to dollars the same way, preferably either million or M and either billion or B. If you use $200K in one place, do not use $200,000 in another place. Writing “$2,000 dollars” is wrong because the $ is all you need.
  5. Search for “company.” Word has a bad habit of wanting you to capitalize company any time it follows a noun (for example, “this insurance company…”). Company should only be capitalized if it is at the start of a sentence or part of a company name (BBB Insurance Company).
  6. Search for % and percent. Both are correct but choose one.
  7. Search for a hyphen after the letter e (as in e-commerce and e-mail). These days, the hyphen is rarely required. The preferred spellings are ecommerce and email.
  8. Search for United States, US, USA, and U.S. Again, any one of these is correct but be consistent in using one.
  9. Search for any punctuation mark that comes in a set. For example, you always need two quotation marks (“ ”), and you always need two parentheses ( ).
  10. Search for question marks (?). Normally, they should not appear in a resume.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the many roles you have to play in creating a resume: marketing guru, expert writer, and master finder of typos on your resume? Contact Robin’s Resumes® for some much-needed help.

Is a Professional Resume Writer Worth the Cost

When most people are deciding whether a professional resume writer is worth the cost, they usually calculate the length of time they saved in hunting for a job. Get hired a month or two earlier, and they have a lot more income in the bank—far more than a professional resume writer costs.

But payback for using a professional resume begins earlier: A professionally written resume renews your confidence in your abilities, reminding you of how much you have actually accomplished over your career; gives you the right words for dealing with any problems in your work history; and helps you project a stronger, more accurate image during interviews.

When you are considering if a professional resume writer is worth the cost, take note of these important points about resumes:

  1. A resume is a marketing document. Are you confused about the line between marketing, bragging, exaggerating, and outright lying? Are you wondering whether to mention a gap in employment, how to handle a career transition, or write about another employment anomaly? Are you confident that you know what should be on your resume and what does not need to be there? A professional resume writer will give your resume focus, take care of anomalies, and highlight those parts of your employment record that will get you the job you want now.
  2. A resume is more than a history of tasks—it is a record of accomplishments. Do you have a brag book where you have kept track of your accomplishments? Do you remember how much you learned from each job in your past and how much you contributed? A professional resume writer will help you recall your achievements and put them in context.
  3. A poorly written resume is a reflection on you as a potential employee. Are you sure about punctuation, grammar, and spelling? Are you ready to double-check every acronym and company name in your resume or will you just assume that they are correct? Do the dates of employment lining up and have you consistently used the past tense for former jobs? A professional resume writer will make sure that your resume is error-free.
  4. A resume must communicate. Is your resume able to pass through Applicant Tracking Systems so that recruiters and hiring managers actually have a chance to read it? Are you able to present technical or scientific information in a way that recruiters and hiring managers can understand? Does your resume align with your social media presence, or do you need to rethink your online image? A professional resume writer can help you bridge any communications gap.

At Robin’s Resumes®, our professionally written resumes have been worth the cost to thousands of job seekers. We prepare resumes that propel our clients from inquiry to interview. Contact us today.

Resume Horror Stories

Welcome back to our yearly expose of resume horror stories.

Resume Horror #1: Inappropriate Portfolio

A young man applied for a job interview as a graphic designer for a consulting firm in the gas and oil industry. His resume included a link to his portfolio—which consisted of lovely pictures of nudes and landscapes. If you are providing a portfolio, make sure it is aligned with the goals and customers of the company.

Resume Horror #2: Nonexistent Links

A woman with lots of experience was applying for a job as a copyeditor. Her resume included links to previous online projects, but some of them were so old that they no longer worked. If you provide links, limit them to the most relevant and recent, and make absolutely sure they are working.

Resume Horror #3: Ego First

Enthusiasm is a great quality, but one job applicant for a leadership role took it a little too far by spending most of his resume boasting about his success as a marathoner. While companies want to know you are well rounded and determined, they also appreciate restraint. Plus resume space is limited; you should use most of it to show that you have the skills, education, and experience the company specified in their job posting.

Resume Horror #4. Detail Overload

Yes, the old rule demanding a one-page resume is out the door. But one executive assistant decided that allowed her to detail every task she performed over the past 10 years—creating a highly repetitive resume of four pages. If you are going to send someone a four-page resume, make sure you have the interesting content to justify it and that you are as concise as you possibly can be.

Resume Horror #5. Where and When did you Work?

The applicant updated his old resume but forgot to change the verb tense (from present to past) for his older job in Florida. Even worse, he failed to change the employment dates of the Florida job. The resume seemed to say he was holding down two full-time jobs at once—the old one in Florida (“2005 to Present”) that he actually left in 2010 and the current one in Illinois (“2010 to Present”).

Want to avoid becoming a resume horror story? Contact Robin’s Resumes® today.

Resumes for Consultants

Are you a consultant (contractor or freelancer) to companies, taking on limited term projects without being a full-time employee?

In the view of the Internal Revenue Service, consultants, in general, must meet a few criteria such as the following: they are not economically dependent on one company, control the manner of doing their own work, do not receive benefits from the company, and pay their own social security tax.

Resumes for a consultant are the essentially the same as for any other job. The biggest difference is in the length of time that a consultant is associated with any given company. A consultant’s resume must avoid the appearance of job hopping, and you can accomplish that in two ways.

  • Identify yourself throughout your resume as a Consultant (or Contractor or Freelancer), including in the heading of your resume.
  • Give yourself a “company” name (your name and a keyword are fine: Smith Engineering or Jane Doe Financial Consulting). That way, when you write your resume, you can group many projects under your company name without appearing to change employment every few months. This approach is particularly helpful if consultancy is a stage between full-time employment.

If you worked on hundreds of short-term projects as a consultant, your resume does not need to list every company and every project. But it should definitely list any well-known companies you have worked for; any major achievements (“brought in project 15% under budget”); and any of your skills that may not be available to a company in-house. After all, one of the main reasons that companies hire consultants is to fill a gap in their in-house capabilities.

Consultants perform a valuable service and companies are aware of this. Your resume should celebrate your ability to quickly come up to speed on a project, work with a wide variety of peers and managers, assume control of your work, and produce results that motivate other companies to hire you.

Having served as a consultant myself during my long career as an engineer, I know the value of a strong consultant resume. Please contact me today.

Resumes That Are Kind to Recruiters and Hiring Managers

Hiring managers and recruiters are like everyone else. They want to understand what they are reading. Therefore, your resume has two jobs: to present you in the best possible light and to help recruiters and hiring managers appreciate you. To accomplish that:

  1. Make it easy for the recruiter or hiring manager to find your contact information, the position you are interested in, and your qualifications. It is your responsibility to match your background to their job requirements; it is never their responsibility to hunt through your resume to find out where you would fit in their organization. Make sure your contact information is easy to read; start with a strong statement of your outstanding skills and accomplishments; and honestly match your details to the requirements listed in the job posting or advertisement.
  2. Help recruiters and hiring managers understand what you do. Avoid jargon and acronyms. Place your skills in context: how did they help productivity, customer relations, communications, team building, idea generation, the bottom line? Placing skills in context also avoids over-simplification (see #3 below): everyone understands what filing is but how did your filing help the people you worked with?
  3. Be generous when talking about your former company or coworkers. It is fine to say that your actions increased profits for the first time in years or reduced turnover or bridged silos. But do not use your resume or your social media accounts to accuse your company or coworkers of illegal, toxic, or simply extremely irritating behavior. If asked, you are moving on for new opportunities—not because you hated your boss and coworkers.
  4. Never lie. Lies easy to detect with verification, background, and employment checking programs and services. They are also hard to remember and support during an interview. Discrepancies in dates, false information about degrees and training, inflated or false titles, and nonexistent employers are easy to check out and will ruin any chance of a job offer.

At Robin’s Resumes®, we produce top quality resumes with clear information that distinguishes you from the competition and shows off your strengths, without disparaging anyone or stretching the truth. If you would like help in reaching those goals, contact us today.

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