Help me correct my resume and get hired!

In My Humble Opinion
21

I head up a small business and see tons of resumes. Also, I did a fair amount of critiquing while working for the Career Development office at my alma mater back in the day.

One of the things I look for is a focused career objective statement. It has to show me that the applicant wants the job for which I’ve advertised an opening. What I mean by “focused” is that the applicant isn’t just looking for a job in the advertising/marketing/PR field (the general sector in which my company operates), but they’ve narrowed their search to the particular sub-sector we occupy (digital advertising). If an applicant submits a resume with an unfocused career objective, I usually toss it. It tends to mean they’ll take the first job that comes along in a wide field, and I’m looking for people who want to do what we do.

Some of the folks editing your resume have done a pretty good job editing out passive voice. Be sure to check for parallel construction as well. This is something I personally look for, because if it’s absent, the applicant probably doesn’t have the requisite writing skills for the gig.

This might get me flamed, but I agree about editing this to take out references to the Republican Party. Somebody else said it first - the job of a resume is to get you interviews. I know a lot of people who would reject your resume based on your political views alone. Yes, doing so is wrong. But it’s a sad fact of life. The experience is great and it shows you’re able to motivate and manage people. I’d just take “Republican” out of it.

22

Actually I tend to disagree with the word “fluent.” Fluent doesn’t mean perfect, fluent doesn’t mean without mistake, fluent just means effortless. You can speak a language fluently and still make mistakes. I speak fluent Spanish but there’s a lot I don’t know. Now if you said your Arabic was native-level then that’d be a problem.

Americans think that speaking a native language with any level of competency is some kind of a big deal, so when you grow up hearing that someone is “fluent” in another language you’re kind of in awe. And you assume it means perfect. Fluent doesn’t mean perfect, it just means able to carry on a conversation without effort.

But the problem is that using this definition can be misleading for the same reason. You say you’re fluent in a language and then you’ve got problems when they expect native-level competency.

THespos, I have a question for you. Earlier I mentioned how I had a resume that was properly formatted with a non-standard font. When I checked it out on another computer there were lines that spilled on to the next. What would you do if you saw a resume like that? Surely it must be a bad thing, right?