Professional Help: Why Your Resume is Getting Ignored (Part 2)

30 Jan Professional Help: Why Your Resume is Getting Ignored (Part 2)

Landing an interview is difficult these days, but applicants continue to sabotage themselves by not putting their best foot forward. Hiring managers are evaluating you not only on the skills you claim to have on your resume, but also on the skills you should have.

Here is the another mistake that causes your resume to be ignored:

2 – Demonstrating a lack of mastery of Microsoft Office

There are plenty of word processors in the marketplace, but the person reviewing your resume is using Microsoft Word. This means your resume should be formatted in that program. And, your resume should show you clearly know how to use it.

Here are some ways applicants come across of MS Word illiterate:

• Having basic typos – spell check is your friend
• Using a font size less than 10 – making your resume too small to read
• Moving page margins excessively to fit your too long resume on one page
• Leaving blank pages in your file – shows you either don’t know how to delete them or are too lazy to do it
• Presenting a sloppy document (i.e. unaligned bullets, random spacing, sporadic formatting)

Your resume is your calling card and it’s all a hiring manager has to evaluate you without meeting you.

They won’t bother reaching out to you if it doesn’t appear you can master a necessary business program like Microsoft Word.

Caveat–Creatives (i.e. graphic designers, producers, arts) may have some leeway here, but remember an HR Director isn’t likely to have Photoshop or any other creative program loaded on their computer. Also, they will not be able to open anything larger that a 1MB file. If they can’t open it, they will not contact you. Submit a resume in a Word document and add a link to your online portfolio–either on your resume or within your cover letter).

What are some major MS Word blunders you’ve seen in resumes? What are some of the faux pas you’ve made in your resume submissions?

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