The list of do's and don'ts when preparing your resume

During past couple of years many times I was asked by my colleagues in the HR department "Could you please shortlist these resumes for interviews?" answer was almost always yes. As a result I have gone through a large number of resumes to check whether if these people are suitable for an interview. 

While I'm scanning these resumes I found many reasons that I could reject these let alone the technical incompetencies of the candidates. Then suddenly one day I said to myself "why don't you write simple blog post about this?". So here I'm trying to put up a list of reasons that your resume might get rejected and how to minimize it. When you read this you will realize how trivial some mistakes are but they could surely cost your chance of landing your dream job.

Typos in the resume

Well I hate typos because it shows you how inconsiderate you are, keep in mind your resume is the first contact point with your potential employer so why don't you spend few extra minutes to verify your typos. And on the other hand if you can't type something correctly in MS Word how can I expect you to write a maintainable piece of code in C# with Visual Studio.

I have seen many typos in the section headings in resumes which usually goes in CAPS. You should be careful specially when typing in CAPS because in some cases MS Word may ignore your typos in CAPS.

Cover letter

It's always good to accompany your resume with a cover letter. Because it gives a personal touch and in my opinion a well written cover letter could avoid your resume getting rejected at the first glance (because you have already made a positive contact with your cover letter). If you can't write it get someone else to write it, it's worth the try.

Make it a PDF

At the time you create the resume with MS Word it may look stunning with all the colors and perfect alignments, but when I open it in my machine I could hardly read a thing in that file and alignments more often than not go AWOL. So make it a PDF. There are plenty of online tools which you use freely, just do a Google search.

Name of the file

Even though this is very trivial fact, it will add more value to your resume if you name the file in a meaningful way. Don't you agree that a proper name such as "Resume_Yourname" makes more sense than just "CV.docx"? Remember the personal touch I mentioned earlier. 

Referees

You apply for the position of the Software Engineer, and you put up two referees in you resume. One is a random marketing manager who happened to be a friend of your brother and the other one is the director of some random company who lives next door. Do you really think that they could make a good endorsement about you for this position?

Get a couple of your lecturers to appear in your CV or else someone from the place you worked before, it's not that we always contact these referees and get endorsements. It shows how good you are at keeping your past relationships.

Mention about your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is your free online resume, everyday an amazing number of people gets head hunted through LinkedIn. If you don't have one already stop reading this and create profile now. Make it a habit to maintain your profile. Facebook might waste hours of your valuable time but an hour spent on making your LinkedIn profile better, might attract you the job of your dreams.

Don't mention a list of web sites

I don't know what you expect by adding a long list of website which you contributed during past employments. It's always better to explain things such as what responsibilities you held in the team and what were technologies got exposed to. Because when closely look at these sites you mention in your CV they are mostly private sites which requires a username and a password. Well in my case I have seen enough login pages and I don't want to see the ones you list your resume.

Apply for a suitable position

You have been in the industry for 8 years and you send your CV to be considered for Software Engineer position, sheer awkwardness of the above equation will force me to reject your CV.

Class and GPA

Even though I couldn't understand this in the early days of my career, Class and GPA matters. When I go through a heap of resumes that look exactly the same, it's inevitable that a resume with a first class honors and GPA 3.9/4.0 would get selected.

But don't worry if you don't have the first class and the best GPA, because I don't have a first class my GPA was something around 3/4 and I don't worry. 

And if you don't have a first class or a second upper, it's better not to mention about that in your CV. Simply it's not worth mentioning.

Empty fields in the resume

There were couple of instances I have seen that people forgot to enter information in the resume. You simply have a field called "Home Phone : " and you don't have a value there. You might have copied the resume format from your friend and you don't have a home phone, if that's the case just delete that field. Otherwise that gives me a very negative message about the completeness of your work. Well how about you temporarily commenting a code line in your DEV machine for testing purposes and forget to uncomment it before you check the file in.

Branding

Very recently I was introduced to this site called branded.me , it connects with your LinkedIn profile and makes a cool website for you.

And don't forget it's your brand you should market it and you should make it clearly visible in every possible way. Because you are not the only fish in the sea.