ResumeWriting.com

So that’s basically it. Your resume should be done at this point. But before I get to my summation and show you what your resume should look like in general, some of you might be wondering if there aren’t a few items I’ve forgotten to include.

Nope. I haven’t forgotten anything. Some people seem to think there are some additional details to add to your resume. But I disagree.

Here are my big three no-nos:

1. Personal Information.

So, you volunteer at your son’s school? Great. You love playing volleyball? Fantastic. You’ve been married for 14 years? Congratulations.

But none of those things belong on a resume in my opinion. Again, a resume is a professional document. It’s not your Match.com dating profile. Sure, an employer might want to learn a bit more about you so they can get a fuller picture of who you are as a person. But they can get that info in the interview. Don’t waste valuable space on your resume talking about how you’re the president of the local gardening club.

Even if we’re talking about commendable volunteer activities that show you’re a good citizen!

I say, leave all the personal stuff out.

(Caveats… caveats… My one caveat here is if volunteering helps you flesh out an otherwise thin resume or helps fill in a gap in your work history. A recent grad might include their volunteer work to show they are engaged in their community and take the place of work experience they don’t yet have. Another example would be a stay at home mom or someone who was unemployed for a period of years. People like that probably should include volunteering and community work to show they remained active despite a lull in their career history.)

2. Salary History or Salary Requirements.

This is something else I would leave off the resume and save for the interview. If the employer specifically asks for a salary history, then go ahead and include it. But if it were me, I would hope they wouldn’t ask. And if they don’t ask, then leave it off entirely.

Why? Simple: you don’t know if your salary history or salary requirements will give them a good opportunity to screen you out… or worse, screen you in, but to your disadvantage!

Most open positions… they have a specific budget for the position. If you’re dumb enough to volunteer a lower salary… well then, congratulations, you’ve just given them a bargain and screwed yourself out of what you probably could have gotten paid.

Conversely, if you’re competing with 200 other applicants, a quick way for the employer to weed you out of consideration is if you show yourself to be too expensive.

The common rule of thumb is to avoid being the first one to suggest a salary at all costs. So why even bring up the salary right off the bat in your resume?

3. Lies.

Obviously, lying on your resume is not the best idea in the world. I don’t think you’ll be able to find anybody who will tell you that lying on your resume is a good thing to do. So, I’m not going to repeat the obvious.

What I am going to do is tell you why this is a bad idea. Based on my experience working with clients, there are two things that I have observed about resume falsehoods.

First, there’s a Murphy’s law in play here. Whatever you lie about always has a way of coming to the surface. You can be 99.9% honest on your resume… but fudge in just one little area. If you do, I promise you, that is the one little thing that will trip you up somewhere down the road.

I can think of a very specific example. This is only one example, I know, but this is the kind of thing that happens all the time. One of my writers had a client who was in web programming and development. This was a couple of years ago when AJAX first burst on the scene and was becoming the rage. The client was versed and skilled in an array of languages and programs… but not AJAX. Well, it seems that after we did the resume for the client, he kept hearing in interviews AJAX, AJAX, AJAX. As I said, it was all the rage. So he took it upon himself to add that to his list of skills. Just that one little word: AJAX. I guess he figured he could learn it later if it came up.Well, I heard later it went like this: he got hired at a non-tech firm to be their programming guru. Brought him in to take over the place and bring them into the 21st century. A great gig. But of course, everything they wanted to do (revamp their calender system, their internal messaging system, etc.) they wanted it to be full of AJAXy goodness. Long story short, the guy figured he couldn’t learn everything overnight, and he had to fess up that he didn’t know much about AJAX. He told the company they’d have to hire a second guy, an AJAX specialist, to come in and help him with the projects. Of course, the company lost a lot of trust in our AJAX-deficient friend, and it turned out that within a few months the second guy, the guy brought in to help with the AJAX, got promoted to project lead ahead of him. I heard all this because the guy was back needing a resume again six months later because he was out of a job.

And that leads me to my second observation about resume lies: they’re right there in black and white. You can’t talk your way out of them or deny them. It’s right there on paper. Our AJAX friend, for example, might have been able to plead confusion or misunderstanding if his thing had just come up in the interview or the conversation. But there was nothing he could say about the fact that right there, on his resume, he had knowingly claimed AJAX as one of his skill sets. He had represented that he could do a certain thing, solve a certain problem for the company. It was obviously a fabrication. And he couldn’t make it go away.

So in summation, the things I’ve learned about resume lies are: the lies have a funny way of surfacing when you least expect them to; and the lies can’t be erased: they’re right there in black and white.