Ultimate Resumes eNews
DECEMBER 2005

Happy Holidays from Ultimate Resumes!
The holidays are here again and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of my friends, clients, family, and everyone who has supported Ultimate Resumes over the past year and a half. I wish you all a happy and healthy holiday.

I am pleased to announce that I have started writing a series of articles for financial and real estate expert Ilyce Glink’s acclaimed website, www.thinkglink.com . The articles that I am writing for Ilyce’s site will discuss all aspects of the job search and resume creation process. The articles can be found on the “Making Money” page at thinkglink.com but that may change as her website is undergoing some upgrades. I encourage you to peruse Ilyce’s website because she is always adding new content and she offers many great tips and resources about personal finance and real estate issues. My husband and I found her book, “100 Questions Every First Time Homebuyer Should Ask” to be an invaluable tool when we purchased our first home recently.

This is the time of year when many people start to think about the job search or graduate school application they will commence in the New Year. For that reason an Ultimate Resumes gift certificate can be a great holiday gift! Just send us an email and we will help you to create the perfect gift package from Ultimate Resumes. We will send a beautiful certificate that will make a lovely gift for the job seeker or soon-to-be graduate student in your life.

For those of you who are considering beginning a job search after the holidays I have listed a few tips to help you to create a top-notch resume.

Happy Holidays!

Liz Handlin

Top Five Resume Mistakes That Could Derail Your Job Search
Creating a great resume can be difficult. Sometimes it’s hard to think about your accomplishments, achievements, and all the things that make you great at your job. The key to a great resume is to focus on exactly that: what makes you special. But in addition to selling yourself in the most advantageous way it’s also important to focus on the little details that, if overlooked, could spell disaster for your job search. Following are 5 mistakes you don’t want to make when writing a resume:

1. Listing Your Job Description Instead Of Describing Your Accomplishments
When you sit down to write your resume it’s a good idea to use your job description as a guideline and only as a guideline. You spend your day doing your job and sometimes the job description is just a broad outline of the tasks you really perform. So, make sure that you don’t simply list the duties that are written in your job description. Focus on accomplishments such as the promotions you earned, money you have saved the company, projects completed on time and under budget, and anything you do that can be quantified or measured.

2. Sloppy Formatting
Make your resume easy to read and understand. In a competitive environment recruiters don’t need to work hard to figure out who your last two employers were or your dates of employment. Make sure that the resume format you use is consistent and easy to read. The names of your employers, dates, job titles, and locations should all be in a consistent place on the page throughout the resume.

3. Time Gaps and Missing Dates
Make sure that you account for any apparent time gaps on your resume and include dates for all education and employment. Make it easy for recruiters to understand where you have spent your time and include your dates of employment, the year you graduated from college, and the dates at which you worked for each employer. With that said if you have 20 or more years of experience you don’t have to include your college work-study jobs or your first analyst job right out of college. But, it’s important to account for your time. If you were unemployed for a few years because you stayed home to raise children its ok to mention that fact on your resume. Make sure that recruiters don’t have to guess how you have been spending your time because many recruiters will disqualify a resume that isn’t easy to understand.

4. Misspelling and Grammatical Errors
Spelling and grammatical errors on your resume send a message to recruiters that you were sloppy in your preparation and that you don’t want the job badly. While that may not seem fair, it is a reality that most hiring managers react poorly to finding spelling errors on a resume or in a cover letter. Spelling and grammatical errors make your application for employment an easy “no” for a recruiter or hiring manager. Most word processing software includes a spell check function. Make sure that you use spell check and, if possible, also ask a friend to review your resume to see if there are any errors that you or the computer missed. Be accurate with your spelling or you may be out of luck with your job search.

5. Too Much or Too Little Information
When describing your work experience you should make sure that your explanation isn’t so brief that the depth of your experience doesn’t shine through. But also make sure that you don’t turn your career into the great American novel. Explain what you have done focusing on results and achievements. Don’t be repetitive or over-explain. As a general rule of thumb, if your resume exceeds 2 pages, re-evaluate the amount of information you included. There are cases in which a resume in excess of two pages is appropriate but most people find two pages to be plenty of room in which to describe what they have accomplished.

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