Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips

Job-hunting tips from the March 31, 2003 issue of QuintZine.

ResumeDoctor.com recently undertook the immense project of conducting a survey of more than 2,500 recruiters/headhunters throughout the U.S. and Canada to find out their "Pet Peeves" about resumes. These recruiters hailed from varied specialties and industries, including engineering, information technology, sales and marketing, executive, biotech, healthcare, administrative, and finance. ResumeDoctor.com sought to find out recruiters' resume likes and dislikes and what it takes to get them to read a resume. Keeping in mind that these are the peeves of recruiters/headhunters, which may, in some cases, be different from those of HR people and hiring managers, check out the top 20 results of the survey. If you go to the actual survey results, you'll have the opportunity to click each item for a detailed discussion:

20. Burying important info in the resume
19. Gaps in employment [Editor's note: See our article on handling gaps in employment in this issue.]
18. 1st or 3rd person. Resumes written in either 1st or 3rd person
17. No easy-to-follow summary
16. Pictures, graphics, or URL links no recruiter will call up
15. Resumes sent in .pdf, .zip files, faxed, Web page resumes, mailed resumes and not sent as WORD Attachment. [Editor's note: Be aware that this peeve comes from recruiters/headhunters, and that some employers -- and even some recruiters/headhunters may actually PREFER resumes in some of these formats; see our article, Your E-resume's File Format Aligns with its Delivery Method, for a complete discussion of these formats.]
14. Font choice. Poor font choice or style
13. Objectives or meaningless introductions [Editor's note: See our article, Should You Use a Career Objective on Your Resume?]
12. Lying, misleading (especially in terms of education, dates and inflated titles)
11. Employer info not included and/or not telling what industry or product candidate worked in
10. Personal information not relative to the job
9. Unqualified candidates. Candidates who apply to positions they are not qualified for
8. Long paragraphs. No use of bullet-points
7. Long resumes
6. Functional resumes -- as opposed to writing a Chronological Resume [Editor's note: While functional resumes are a particular peeve among recruiters/headhunters, they still have their uses. See our article in this issue, What Resume Format is Best for You?]
5. Poor formatting of boxes, templates, tables, use of header and footers
4. Contact information. None or inaccurate contact info or unprofessional email addresses
3. Dates not included or inaccurate dates
2. Too duty oriented. Reads like a job description and fails to explain what the job seeker's accomplishments were and how they did so. [Editor's note: See our article, For Job-Hunting Success: Track and Leverage Your Accomplishments.]
1. Spelling errors, typos and poor grammar

We've mentioned the tax deductibility of resume services in this space before, but at this time of year, the information bears repeating. The Career News notes that, according to Aran Dokovna, partner at Saxe, Roth, Dokovna, Schwartz & Lynskey, a Van Nuys, CA, public accounting firm specializing in tax preparation and planning, "most of the costs associated with job searching can be deducted." Deductible expenses include resume-writing services and software, employment coaching services, resume printing, mailing, and other resume posting and distribution service expenses. The firm further noted that travel expenses to and from interviews, including parking, gasoline, lodging, airfare, and overnight meals, are deductible but fall under the category of "miscellaneous deductions" and must exceed 2 percent of your adjusted gross income to be deductible. For more information on job-seeking deductions, see the section on "miscellaneous deductions" in IRS Publication 17 or contact a professional tax planner.

Is the resume here to stay? Or, in a world where myriad job boards and employer career centers request that candidates submit profile information in an endless array of configurations, could the resume be dead? Not according to Dave Lefkow, an interactive solutions consultant for TMP Worldwide. "The bottom line is that candidates all still have resumes. That will probably never change unless one system becomes the standard for all career Web site recruiting as we know it and allows reuse among employers -- a highly unlikely scenario," Lefkow predicts in The Electronic Recruiting Daily. He further exhorts the recruiting technology industry against making it "harder for candidates to use the information we know they already have." Lefkow asserts that "creating too much structure for candidates and too many obstacles to applying is, in my opinion, recruiting technology gone bad. It is up to us as an industry to create a win-win technology scenario that simultaneously eases the burden for recruiters and candidates." Read the full article.

Review all our Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips.

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