5 Resume Mistakes You MUST Avoid (with real examples)!

all right so when I was applying to my first full-time job I sent out a total of 367 cold emails received 21 first round interviews and ended up with five full-time job offers but what those numbers do not show is that most of those interviews only came after I started doing two things first networking my butt off with alumni recruiters and hiring managers and second editing my resume based on their feedback so in this video I'll First share the five biggest resume mistakes I made back in the day then go through the changes that land

and meet all those first round interviews let's get started hi friends welcome back to channel if you're new here my name is Jeff Comfort the career tips and stay for the painfully accurate job search memes mistake number one putting the education section above the work experience section while I am still extremely proud of my GP and SAT score recruiters and hiring managers know that any sort of work experience including internships or extracurricular activities translate much better to on the job for performance and this is because when written correctly the bullet points on your resume help

them visualize your ability to do the job they're hiring for let's imagine a hiring manager starts to scan down my bad resume she sees my GPA the classes that I took my High School honor roll realizes none of that is relevant just to wasted 30 seconds of her life and she moves on to the next applicant now imagine she opens up a resume and sees immediately I've worked on finance transformation and supply chain projects she thinks okay this candidate has some industry knowledge and can probably present to clients he actually might be a good fit

for this project we're currently short staffed on and she reads on even if I only had my first summer internship available she would know at least I have worked in a finance department before and I have basic Excel skills oh and I probably should have mentioned this sooner but I've linked the PDF versions of the two resumes for free and down below so feel free to reference them when updating your own resume mistake number two not showing impact if you take a quick look at my original KPMG example assisted with project governance presented to a

banking client help with project research you'll notice something awkward I use all these fancy over complicated words but you still don't know the implication of those actions compare this with the updated version of the same bullet point even though I start off basically the same way you can clearly see the result of my contributions the banking client successfully opened a branch in the local market this is the difference between just saying fluffy buzzwords and actually showing impact I can't stress this enough and hey don't just take my word for it big name career coaches like

Austin belsack and Adam Broda reiterate this all the time you need to communicate what you accomplished and even Ali abdall someone we don't normally associate with being professional or businessy right he says so this is a bunch of buzzwords that is not substantiated by anything at all and at this point many of you might fall into the Trap of mistake number three failing to include meaningful metrics and the reason I know is from all the comments in my original resume video this one sums out what many of you might be thinking how do you show

metrics when you're new or you don't have impressive metrics from your internship or this one how do I quantify work achievements I'm at a startup where data points are not established yet not sure how to State metrics while staying authentic and the short answer is that recruiters and hiring managers care much more about the effort you put into quantifying your impact rather than the actual numbers themselves for example when I apply to my first ever internship I literally wrote my presentation scored 23 higher than the class average that seems insignificant right yes but it also

shows I knew the success metric of the presentation the score and I took the extra step to Benchmark my performance to that of my peers Pro tip a foolproof way to quantify your impact is to keep asking yourself so what taking my SAT tutoring experience as an example I might have started off with taught sat during my summer break in college okay so what the average increase in my students SAT scores was 280 points so what seven out of the eight seniors got accepted into their first choice colleges impact to really drive this point home

because it's so important here's an extreme example it's much better to write delivered on average nine coffees a day with 100 accuracy on all orders for three months then I fetch coffee for senior Associates during my summer internship mistake number four is a tough one for me to admit because I remember being very defensive when I got this feedback and that is not tailoring my resume for each job application I mean back then I applied to over 50 jobs and I was lazy I wasn't going to create 50 versions of the same resume but the

present more mature me would tell you two things first the workload isn't that bad if you focus your attention on three to five roles which you should be doing anyways because the apply to everything approach doesn't work well in today's job market so why not invest more time in the quality of your application rather than the quantity second for a similar set of roles you can copy and paste those job descriptions into workload generator to easily identify relevant skills the recruiter might be looking for and add those keywords into your resume this is a very

easy way to tailor your resume for different roles and I go through step-by-step instructions in my original resume video so I'll link that down below Pro tip this is the biggest difference between your LinkedIn profile and your resume your LinkedIn should give a more General overview of who you are professionally and shouldn't change all that much whereas your resume should be more hyper targeted for each application mistake number five is overlooking the small things and to show you what I mean take a look at this part of my original resume pause the video and see

if you can spot the mistake these two hyphens are formatted differently did you notice some of you might already be rolling your eyes right now but believe me when I tell you first impressions matter and while perfect formatting won't guarantee you the interview easily avoidable errors like this can be a red flag again don't just take my word for it or the word of those corporate LinkedIn career gurus here's Ali abdall again a bunch of spelling and grammar are issues there like this is really obvious stuff so whether you're applying for a role in a

traditional Corporation or a fun and chill startup small things matter that's what he said nope that was inappropriate sorry about that a simple way to catch these mistakes is to send your resume to 10 people you know and get their feedback or at the very least use a tool like grammarly or even autocorrect in Google Docs alright once you've updated that resume make sure to check out this video on how to write an effective cover letter to maximize your chances for a first round interview see you in the next video in the meantime have a

great one