18 Things To Take Off Your Résumé And LinkedIn Profile Today To Succeed Tomorrow
Source | www.forbes.com | Jack Kelly
During my 20-plus years of recruiting, I have reviewed roughly over 480,000 résumés and LinkedIn profiles. I’m not too handy with numbers (which is why I’m a recruiter rather than an accountant), but making an educated guess based on my meager math skills, I have searched—at the very least—50 LinkedIn profiles and reviewed 50 résumés per day. These numbers are probably less than I actually look at, but 100 per day made my calculations easier. Also, it doesn’t include Saturdays and Sundays (yes, I don’t have a life and work most weekends). A hundred a day, times five days a week, every month, over 20 years, provided me with the opportunity to review an awful lot of résumés and profiles.
This has enabled me to observe what works well and resonates with hiring managers and what doesn’t. One of the more interesting and counterintuitive things I’ve noticed is that even my highly-experienced candidates—attended top universities, hold advanced degrees, such as MBAs and law—tend to sabotage their résumés and LinkedIn profiles with rookie mistakes.
As I previously wrote on Forbes.com, there is a simple art to crafting a résumé. The gist of it is to think of the résumé as a marketing tool. Hiring managers are generally busy executives with little time to spend reading lengthy résumés. To be time-efficient, they need to see the candidate’s qualifications that are required for the job at hand. They have very little patience for fluff and extraneous information that distracts from their core skills and experience. Also, there are certain things listed on a résumé or LinkedIn profile that are deal killers.
