Our marketing team is hiring actively for a variety of roles.

While I receive recruiting support from our HR/recruiting team, and other members of the marketing team, I try to keep close to all stages of the talent recruiting funnel. (A key responsibility of leading a brand is understanding the talent your brand attracts.)

This post is about the “top” of the recruiting funnel — the resume submission stage. And I’ll cut to the chase: I’m shocked by how many educated, experienced and outgoing candidates fail on resume fundamentals.

If you are a candidate lobbying for a marketing role, please avoid the following worst resume mistakes:

  1. Creating a logo out of your name and using Web 2.0 reflection effect
  2. Including a headline that states you will be either a marketing professional or a menswear designer within five years
  3. Getting too artistic with your resume, like using crazy fonts and colors and angling the text at 45 degrees; it may stand out, though I don’t want to angle my head to read your qualifications, and recruiting softwares won’t properly scan your details
  4. Including a full-spread background image of yourself, behind all the resume text
  5. Featuring your religion in the first sentence, or at all (unless you are applying for a position with a religious organization)
  6. Embedding a headshot in your resume
  7. Saying you are a candidate for a degree for May 2014 when the date of your application is October 2014
  8. Saying your goal is to “be a leader in the financial industry,” if you are applying for a role in another industry
  9. Writing resume introductory statements that take up an entire page
  10. Submitting resumes that are more than one-page, if you are applying for a non-technical role
  11. Including irrelevant facts and experience, especially if you have other highly relevant experience and knowledge to share
  12. Featuring grammar mistakes in the first line of your resume; perhaps the most common violation is ignorance of compound modifiers
  13. Talking about yourself in the third person, then the first person, then the third person, in your resume’s intro statement  (assuming you need one to begin with)
  14. Making grammar mistakes when you are an MBA graduate from a top 15 MBA school

I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon, or state the obvious, or post another “resume mistakes” cliche article. But if you avoid these pitfalls, you’ll increase your chances for success.

Photo: Juliana Coutinho

Published by Max Kalehoff

Father, sailor and marketing executive.