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:
- Creating a logo out of your name and using Web 2.0 reflection effect
- Including a headline that states you will be either a marketing professional or a menswear designer within five years
- 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
- Including a full-spread background image of yourself, behind all the resume text
- Featuring your religion in the first sentence, or at all (unless you are applying for a position with a religious organization)
- Embedding a headshot in your resume
- Saying you are a candidate for a degree for May 2014 when the date of your application is October 2014
- Saying your goal is to “be a leader in the financial industry,” if you are applying for a role in another industry
- Writing resume introductory statements that take up an entire page
- Submitting resumes that are more than one-page, if you are applying for a non-technical role
- Including irrelevant facts and experience, especially if you have other highly relevant experience and knowledge to share
- Featuring grammar mistakes in the first line of your resume; perhaps the most common violation is ignorance of compound modifiers
- 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)
- 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