Why Your Resume Failed

"I have faxed my resume into more places than I can count, but I haven’t had one single call. I know I’m qualified for the job, so what am I doing wrong?"

This is a common question of people who attend my resume clinics. The moment I see their resume, I have the answer. Many of them used one of the templates for creating a resume that they found for free on their computer. The most popular of those free computer templates creates contact information that isn’t readable when it is faxed.

Another common problem with those templates is that they break up work information. Employers want to know at a glance how long you worked at a particular company. Those templates do not summarize the time worked at one company. Instead, they create the illusion of a job hopper for someone who has worked in several positions at a company, or worked at a company that changed its name. In today’s competitive job market, job-hopping is the kiss of death.

I’ve seen a lot of good candidates make similar resume errors that destroy job opportunities. That is why I created an entire chapter in my book Surviving the 15-Second Resume Read which addressed common problems seen on resumes.

The match game is when you separate your accomplishments from your job position. When an employer looks at your resume, he or she wants to know what you did, how you did it, and what the results were. People who list job positions, then summarize accomplishments in a separate area, keep an employer from assessing true abilities and skills. It is better to show the employer what you did at different job positions, rather than tell them you did great things and ask the employer to trust what you summarize really happened at a job position.

The days of creating a job bio are past. You need to edit your work history and tailor it to a job opening. An employer wants to quickly determine if you are a viable candidate. Putting in excess information is tedious to read and invites an employer to pass over your resume for one that more readily communicates work history. If an employer does try and wade through the excess, he or she may miss your key qualities.

Just as too much information isn’t effective, too little also has its pitfalls. Avoid one-liners. Statements like training, union relations, high-achiever, competent and the list goes on—don’t bring a specific picture to a resume reader’s mind. For instance, the word training doesn’t say if you were trained or you did the training. Union relations doesn’t say if you are a union member, a union negotiator, a union buster, or a union creator. Drop the one-liners and use a short sentence to summarize these skills. As stated before, communicate what you did, how you did it, and the result of what you did. Although all three points aren’t always achievable, the more often you can state them, the better.

The presentation of the resume has an enormous impact. I strongly advice the use of a template, but make it the right template, one that presents your information with regard to font size, ease in reading, and good use of white space. Using a template will create a resume that is easier to edit—something needed as you target different jobs—and it will survive emailing. On the other hand, using lines spaces and tabs will create a resume that will print out miss aligned when emailed, even if the recipient has the same word processing program.

A good presentation on a successful resume is a combination of good font choice and good use of white space. A successful format allows an employer to skim over the contents of a page and at a glance realize the candidates potential fit for a job.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of format, and in fact, in my book an entire chapter was dedicated to the subject. Perhaps the best way to drive home this point is with an illustration. Ruth Shield brought me her resume because she was getting no response in her job search. I looked over her original resume and found the writing was well done, but she had some serious formatting issues. She used Times New Roman, but the font size was only 10 point. For faxing and ease of reading, Times New Roman needs to be at least 12 point. In addition, she right justified the resume, and her education and technical skills were presented first.

At a glance, not only was her viable job information hard to dig out, but the overall resume sent a subliminal message that might make a person suspect she was incompetent. Ruth was anything but incompetent.

Most of what I did was to reformat her resume. The font was changed to Book Antiqua, 12 point, the justification corrected, and training and technical skills were moved to the right location. The overview information was also bulleted to make it easier to skim read. Ruth took her revised resume to a job fair and had great success. She was called for three interviews and ended up accepting one of the jobs.

The reason I called my book "Surviving the 15-Second Resume Read" was because of the trend in the industry for employers to thumb through a large stack of resumes and decide at a glance which ones will be read more thoroughly. Although this process isn’t fair to a lot of job seekers, look at it from the employer’s perspective. Reading 100 resumes at five minutes each takes over eight and a half hours, and that doesn’t include any coffee breaks. The solution is to create a resume that is easy for the employer to realize your potential at a glance and is readable after being faxed. That way you won’t miss out on job opportunities you are qualified for, something no one can afford in this hostile job market.

Peggy Swager is an award-winning author and a recognized resume expert. She worked for several years for an executive recruiting firm where she learned how job seeking works from both the employer and the candidate’s perspective. She now conducts seminars on job-seeking and resume writing where she tells people how to find jobs in competitive markets, how technology has changed job seeking, and how to write a resume that can communicate job skills in a glance. Her book Surviving the 15-Second Resume Read won an EVVY ward.

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