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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.