Things You Should Remove From Your Resume…ASAP!

Whether you are a CEO of an MNC or an employee in that company or even a student, you have given or will give interviews at some point in your life. Interviews are just an inevitable part of finding a job that everyone has to face.

So are you prepared for the interview you are going to give seeking a new job? How strong is your resume? Well, a resume is quite responsible for impressing the interviewer and HR manager. Do you know, that a strong resume amplifies your chances of being selected by almost 7%?

Therefore, it’s quite crucial for one to build a strong resume in order to grab the job opportunity. In this article, we are not going to discuss the things that you should add to your resume to make it stronger but the things that you SHOULD NOT!

Well, it’s important to know what you should remove from your resume too. Let’s get started!

1. Irrelevant Experience

Employers or interviewers only seek relevant skills and experience in their ideal candidate. Therefore, the addition of unnecessary experience is of no use for them or their company.

For instance, you might have worked at a big firm as a graphic designer for years. But now if you are seeking a career change and giving an interview for a data scientist’s position, your experience as a graphic designer is not very much necessary to add to your resume as it’s quite irrelevant to the position you are applying for. It is only ideal to add experience or certifications that are relevant to the position you are applying for. In the case of the above example, adding data science course certification and experience in entry-level data scientist jobs can be fruitful.

2. Grammar Mistakes

Well, this goes without saying. But still, a lot of people ignore spelling and grammatical mistakes on their resumes, which is a really big mistake.

Do you know? In a survey, up to 20% of interviewers agreed that they would reject a candidate if they found even a single spelling or grammatical mistake in the candidate’s resume.

It’s quite important to triple-check your resume by yourself first, then you can get it checked by a friend or colleague too. Make sure to proofread the tense and person perspective you are using in your resume.

PS: You can take the help of online grammar checking tools to ensure proper grammar.

3. Don’t Add up Every Skill You Know

Well done, you know Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other such skills. But it’s high time you stop adding these skills to your resume. Skills like Powerpoint and Excel are too familiar and basic for employers nowadays. Therefore, there’s no need to waste your resume’s space to mention these skills as the employer already expects you to know these basic skills. He won’t be impressed to see these skills on your resume.

Rather, candidates should mention relevant skills that will help them to grow and succeed at that respective job. For example, if you are going for an interview for a graphic designer position, you can add highly demanded skills such as UI/UX illustrator and 3D designing (only, if you possess these skills).

4. How Much Text Is Too Much Text?

Are you writing everything in your resume and thinking that your interviewer will be impressed? CERTAINLY NOT. Most probably he will not even read it completely.

The average time an interview gives reading a resume is about a few seconds, while they decide within 1 minute whether to go on with the application or not. Therefore, it’s simple, you have very little space to impress your interviewer.

Try to write crisp and attractive that would captivate your interviewer at the very first glance. As said above, avoid writing unnecessary skills and experience that are nowhere relevant to the job you are applying for.

5. Enough Of Your Lies

Are you also someone who blatantly lies in your resume thinking that you’ll impress your interviewers? Ahh, don’t do that.

According to a survey, 75% of Human Resource Managers have caught a lie on a candidate’s resume. And it goes without saying that being caught lying on your resume drops your chances of getting selected to almost 0.

Even if you don’t have any remarkable skills to add to your resume, avoid putting up blatant lies. Instead, impressing the interviewers on the skills you actually possess will be the best choice.

Some Other Crucial Points That You Should Remember While Building Your Resume:

#1 Avoid Writing Your Complete Physical Address: It’s the digital era now. No one wants to come to your house and check your legitimacy by themself. Therefore, adding your address to the resume would just take up space. Instead, an email address, LinkedIn ID, etc. would do the trick.

#2 Do Not Put Multiple Contact Numbers: While your intention for giving multiple contact numbers in your resume would be to make the communication easy, it will only make it more confusing for the HR managers to contact you.

#3 No Need To Mention Your Graduation Age: HRs and interviewers don’t really care about your age as long as you are proving right to their skill standards. Therefore, it’s only appropriate to not add your graduation age to your resume.

#4 Don’t Put Cliche Objectives: Unless you are moving into a completely new industry with a different objective in mind after working in a different industry for a long time, there is no need to put your objectives specifically as interviewers already know why their candidates have applied for.

Undoubtedly, as of now, you would have understood the utmost importance of building a professional, engaging, and optimized resume. Although, creating a perfect resume sometimes becomes a stressful task, especially for college students or freshers.

To help you out with this, GeeksforGeeks provides you with the FREE Online Resume Builder that allows you to create a professional, ATS-friendly resume within a few minutes. All you need to do is answer some of the basic questions related to your educational background, skills, achievements, etc.

GeeksforGeeks Resume Builder offers you various enriching resume templates that can surely help you to grab the attention of the recruiters and eventually get hired at your dream company.  

Wrapping Up:

A strong resume, for sure, segregates you from other candidates. Therefore, make sure your job resume is interesting, on point, and captivating. Adding unnecessary things can only make your resume look dull to the HRs and interviewers.

A quick recap of the things you should avoid in your resume:

• Irrelevant Experience
• Grammar & Spelling Mistakes
• Adding Basic Skills
• Too Much Text
• Blatant Lies

We are confident enough that building your job resume while keeping the above-mentioned points in mind will help you build a strong resume.