1. Date of Birth / Age Identifiers
Including your age gives potential employers the chance to be quite selective or ageist and can lead you straight into the dreaded “no” bundle. Leave this date off and keep them guessing. Try to avoid other age indicators too. Remember – the main aim of the resume is to get to interview stage and not to give the reader every minute detail about you.
2. Marital Status / No. of Kids
This information is simply not required when applying for a position and again could lead you to being put in the “no” bundle for various subjective reasons based on the reader’s opinion.
3. Objective
Your objective is already clear as you will be applying for the position. If you are applying for a Senior Engineer role and then on the resume it says, I am seeking a Senior Engineer position, it is just repetition. You should simply include a personal statement highlighting your value add instead.
4. A Photo
The only reason you should ever include a photo with a resume is if how you look really does matter and was requested by a prospective employer. Otherwise, leave it off even if you do look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie! Understand this is different to LinkedIn where you are encouraged to have a photo to get more clicks on your page.
5. Irrelevant / Old Qualifications
Do not include your high school qualification from 1983 – no one cares! Qualifications which have expired should be left off too.
6. Interests / Hobbies
Hiring managers and HR people simply want to know if you can do the job in hand. They do not want to know if you enjoy reading books, watching GOT (Game of Thrones) or socialising with friends so leave that type of stuff out!
7. Images / Special Characters
Due to the development of ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems), these types of images and characters should be omitted from resumes as systems can not properly read them. There are a a lot of other things you can do to align with ATS but this is a good start.
8. Unprofessional e-mail account
Don’t use your email from high school which sounds unprofessional like,”the [email protected]”. How about simply using your first and last name? It only takes 2 minutes to set up a new email account.
END
Hope these tips help and if I can be of anymore assistance, shoot me a mail. I can also offer a Free Resume Health Check via my website. Just click here: UPLOAD RESUME NOW!
