I recently stumbled upon this great list of resumé pet peeves from ResumeDoctor. They surveyed 2500 recruiters in North America from a variety of industries about their biggest pet peeves when it comes to resumés. Here’s the complete list, but you can check out the original list on ResumeDoctor for a more detailed explanation of each pet peeve.
If you think your resumé needs a bit of tweaking, compare it to this list to see which pet peeves you’re guilty of.
- Spelling errors, typos and poor grammar
- Too duty oriented – reads like a job description, failing to explain the job seeker’s relevant accomplishments
- Missing dates or inaccurate dates
- Missing contact info, inaccurate, or unprofessional email addresses
- Poor formatting – boxes, templates, tables, use of header and footers, etc.
- Resumés organized by job function as opposed to chronological by employer
- Long resumés – greater than 2 pages
- Long, dense paragraphs – no bullet-points
- Unqualified candidates – candidates who apply to positions for which they are not qualified
- Personal info not relevant to the job
- Missing employer info and/or not indicating what industry in which the candidate worked
- Lying and misleading – especially in terms of education, dates and inflated titles
- Objectives and meaningless introductions
- Poor font choice or style
- Resumés sent as PDF files, Zip files, faxes, or mailed resumes; i.e. not sent as a WORD attachment
- Irritating pictures, graphics or URL links
- No easy-to-follow summary of skills and accomplishments
- Resumés written with 1st person references, or in the 3rd person
- Unexplained gaps in employment
- Burying important info in the resumé
Good list, except I really don’t get number 15 (Resumés sent as PDF files) is such a big pet peave (I could see Zip files or faxes being annoying). I would have thought it would have been an ideal format. Since it’s basically platform agnostic and the documents always look the same regardless of what system is being used.
And it shows you at a very minimum know how to make a PDF file.
One of the reasons recruiters prefer Word docs is because PDF’s don’t allow customizing. Most recruiters would prefer to add a ‘header’ or ‘footer’ with their company name stamp and date when forwarding candidate resume to a client. It helps eliminate any issues with who-sent-what-when.
I suppose the solution to this is for companies to provide recruiters with software that edits PDFs, and for recruiters to learn how to edit PDFs. If you have the right software and know-how, they are as easy to edit as Word docs.
I think when you’re sending it to a recruitment company don’t send it in PDF but if you’re sending it to an employer I don’t see the harm. I used to be in recruitment and I think people knew not to send it in PFD. I think in the thousands of resumes I ever received a very very small amount would have been in PDF.
I agree, the no PDFs rule is out of date. I received 20 resumes for a job posted last week, and while only 2-3 of them were PDF (the rest were Word) I was more than happy to accept that format. PDF is universal — it works on every platform and different versions don’t pose a problem. The files ranged from 18k to 45k, so size was not a problem.
On the other side of it, unless Word is requested on a job posting, I send my resume in PDF format in order to ensure that the formatting stays intact.
I do the same. I would hate for a carefully crafted resume of mine to end up garbled because of software discrepancies.
exactly
Why not send your resume in both format to make sure? That should take care of this issue. For hiring managers who want to add note then they can free do so with word or if they think the formatting is mess up they could just check the PDF file, sending in both format doesn’t eat up a lot of space anyway and hiring managers also have their option.
I think the no PDF thing is weird since I’ve been told by most employers that they prefer PDFs…
One tip I saw recently was to make sure the PDF is searchable, that it’s not just basically a giant image. That way they can still search for keywords or phrases.