Don't Blow Your Chances with a Resume Blooper: The Seven Deadly Sins of Job Applicants' Resumes
By Kate Perrin
PRofessional Solutions, LLC
It’s your first introduction, your first impression, and your chance to get a foot in the door. Your resume is the tool you use to interest a prospective employer in giving you an interview.
Do you know you have the experience and the skills to be a success but you can’t seem to get the interviews or jobs you want? Perhaps you are one of the hundreds of Washington area PR professionals who sabotage their own efforts by committing one of the Seven Deadly Sins of resume submission.
At PRofessional Solutions, LLC we receive and review the applications of public relations practitioners of all levels of experience and areas of specialization. After years of being amazed at how people who profess to know how to create the right impression for a client don’t know how to do it for themselves, we created the list of the most common problems we see.
Sin 1: Sending your resume blind, without a contact or name on the chance there’s an opening, without knowing about the organization or its positions. Does this mean you’d also send a press release addressed to Whom it May Concern? There’s no excuse for this kind of lazy and sloppy behavior, and no worthwhile employer takes such a resume seriously.
Sin 2: Not tailoring your resume to the job for which you’re applying.
Applying to do internal communications for a corporation? Then don’t list lots of experience in graphic design or include an objective stating you want to do media relations for a PR agency! Use different resumes that highlight different skills and experiences as appropriate.
Sin 3: Highlighting education rather than experience
Unless you just graduated from college and your only work experience is internships and summer jobs your education should not be at the top of your resume. Employers want to know what you’ve done and for whom.
Sin 4: Bad resume appearance.
An amazing number of public relations practitioners don’t seem to know the value of clean, readable design and consistent style. Tiny type and narrow margins to cram information on the page and using lots of fonts, point sizes, and a single bullet under a heading are all ways to look sloppy and inattentive to detail.
Sin 5: Making dumb points.
Don’t use lots of glowing adjectives about yourself and your work style. Accomplishments can speak for themselves. And don’t list everything you ever did – its not all relevant or equally valuable information. Highlight the path you want to follow in the future.
Sin 6: Stealing!
When you send a prospective employer your resume using your current employer’s envelope and postage your are immediately sending the message that you will steal office supplies and time from the new employer as well.
And finally, the number ONE blooper:
Sin 7: A poorly written cover letter -- or none at all!!!
If you can’t produce a good cover letter for your resume, you can’t produce a good pitch letter for your client. One applicant wrote that he had an "ecleted" background. Another claimed succinct writing then provided two pages of tiny type to try to prove it. Many cover letters are pointless because they just say, "here is my resume -- call me".
So take a look at your resume and cover letter with an employer’s eye and a public relations professional’s skill for targeted communication and get the interview.
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