Uh oh. You mispelled “therefore.” Somebody’s going to give you crap about how that means you don’t know how to express yourself and your posts should be discarded. Just a heads up.
That’s the important thing, after all.
The important thing to a sensible employer is not to waste time on interviewing every candidate.
Your mileage may vary. 
Agreed. Now if we could just come up with a foolproof way of separating the sheep from the goats.
Is “mitigated” perhaps a job description, like arbitrated? (resolved disputes)?
I’m guessing not, but I’ll throw it out there. (If so, it would probably be obvious from the job title)
Brian
And to give my thoughts on the OP I think somebody who might not be a native english speaker went thesaurus-happy and ventured into odd territory.
Kind of odd, but not baffling. However, at this point the author of the resume consults one of those large-format paperbacks about power resumes and notices that “fulfilled and terminated” is somewhat redundant.
Hmm, fulfilled is not a “power word” according to this colorful book! What we need is a “power word”! 
Ok, thesaurus for “fulfill”… let’s see “complete”, nah, “accomplish”, nah, “finish”, ugh, weak… Damn, let’s try looking up one of those… [insert forty minutes of aimlessly wandering around a thesaurus drifting farther and farther away from original meaning]… AHA “mitigate”, that sounds awesome “Contract mitigated.”
(leave the resume for a few days, then come back to give it a look-over) Hmm, I have “Contract” as a first word on two out of four lines! That’s not good!
Ah. That’s better! 
I think you’ve got it. From Merriam-Webster’s Online Thesaurus, under “help”:
He was a helper! I think what he wanted was a synonym for the first entry (“to provide (someone) with what is useful or necessary to achieve an end”), but kept reading too far and used a synonym from the second entry instead (“to make more bearable…”).
This is my thinking exactly. Well said.
But it wasn’t part of the job description, it was an addendum after the dates and employer.
A person who uses language imprecisely and incorrectly and who can’t even put together a clear and readable resume is precisely the sort of “leg up” I’d be delighted to give my competitors.
But then, business in my bailiwick is good. The last hiring committee I served on, filling a single entry-level government attorney position, received and reviewed over 150 resumes. At those numbers, if I can’t figure out what the hell you’re saying, your resume will be tossed aside, period. Call to clarify? Why? I’ve got 149 other people to talk to, and they haven’t confused me on paper. Obviously, my attitude would be different if I got, say, three marginally qualified candidates for a position I was desperate to fill. The number and egregiousness of the errors we will overlook is obviously directly tied to how badly we need to fill the position, and how many or how few people are competing for it.
It also should be noted in passing that because I work in the legal field, misuse of a work like “mitigate,” which has a specific and technical meaning in that field, would be a pretty glaring error.
Hey, you might have something there: maybe he murdered all his old bosses, but he’s claiming voluntary manslaughter.
That’s sometimes the situation here and it’s really hard for me! Things that I would use to reject a resume out of hand get overlooked by the group. It’s also the reason a completely incompetent boob is head of an important and sensitive department, but I digress.
Mitigated in medical use means relieved or helped.
I second the theory that the applicant used a thesaurus.
P.S. One of my best electronic techs misspelled “sergeant .”
That’s one way to do it I suppose, but when I have had a lot of candidates for a position, I find it more productive to focus on outstanding qualifications, rather than finding niggling reasons to exclude them. I don’t care if they made a typo, if their experience and achievements meet or exceed my expectations. And if you think 150 candidates is a lot, try advertising for a game designer position. It’s like that mailbag scene in “Miracle on 34th Street”.
I find it more productive to focus on those who successfully present application materials in a way that is tailored for the position and the audience. Attention to detail and word-perfect writing skills are cruicial in this particular field. If you can’t even get it right for your own application, there is no reason to believe you’d get it right for the clients or the court. Different fields and different offices have different criteria and different standards. Our standards were very high, and we could afford to keep them that way, because a lot of people wanted to work for us. IOW, it was not a matter of “focusing on outstanding qualifications” OR expecting well-written appliication materials; we required both.
I agree that this may be an English as a Foreign Language issue. Whether that matters depends on what the job entails.
Having read all your thoughts, I’ve taken another look at the resume.
The name and various other personal details indicate very strongly that this person is a Caucasian native speaker of English.
At one point in the resume, ‘mitigated’ is simply listed under the dates that the contract ran for. This is why I initially assumed that it was being used to mean, as groman pointed out, that the contract had been successfully fulfilled and was therefore terminated.
However.
At other points, the resume has the following two columns:
Left hand column:
[Dates of employment]
Key achievements:
Mitigated.
Right hand column:
[Job title]
[Name of organization\ company]
[Name of temping\ recruitment agency]
Looking at the job titles (Administrative Assitant, for example) it looks very likely that the applicant has had an attack of Thesaurusitis, and is using ‘mitigated’ to mean ‘helped’.
I was willing to believe that it was simply a business term which I hadn’t come across. This now seems very unlikely. And although I am not ultimately responsible for recruitment, I would like to see someone who can use language with rather more precision in this post, which is an editing\ translating\ copywritering position.
Many thanks to all. Once I get out of recruitment and a variety of other work-related hells, I might add my 2c on typos.
That’s not a different usage of a word, it’s a different word with the same meaning. What else would you use “viz.” for?
Mitigated could be part of a job description if it said “what” had been mitigated. If the resume says
Jan.'06 - Mar.'06; Soandso Inc, Potatoville. Receptionist. Mitigated.
Then it sounds like he’s using it to mean “fired” (may be because the person he was subbing for returned, fired doesn’t necessarily imply you screwed up).
The American Heritage Dictionary says:
Maybe he thinks that word communicates that he was relieved of his duties. I suppose if you squint your eyes a lot you could kind of get that, but there are about a gazillion other words I would use to convey the fact I was laid off.