6 Things To Take Off Your Resume Right Now
Sent out a hundred job applications with no responses? Double-check that you’re not using one (or more!) of these dream-destroying resume elements. Making these minor tweaks will significantly improve your job-search results.
Look, I’m not here to take up your time with clickbait articles. You want to know the six things? Here you go!
- An objective
- Interests
- “Team player”
- Multiple columns
- “References available upon request”
- Actual references
Do you want to learn the reasoning behind removing these things? Keep reading. This article isn’t just about deleting a few phrases. Instead, it will help you understand the underlying philosophy between what people typically put on their resumes, and what hiring managers actually want to see.
1. An Objective
An objective is a statement of purpose that looks something like this:
Seeking a position that will allow me to utilize previous training to further develop my skills.
Useless fluff. Obviously, you’re seeking a position. That’s the point of a job application. But fundamentally, an objective focuses on what you want instead of what you do. You can say that you want a managerial position, but if you don’t have the experience, an employer won’t feel comfortable putting you there. Worse, the employer will know that you are unsatisfied in a non-managerial role, so they won’t hire you for any other positions, either. So a 90s-style objective is useless at best, and actively harmful to your job search at worst.
Instead of an objective, put a professional summary at the top of your resume. A summary looks like this:
Energetic new media professional with 15 years of digital marketing experience focusing on new customer acquisition and brand-building.
The professional summary is a very short overview of your work life. It’s a great place to stick a keyword or two from the job posting. Plus, it only takes a few minutes to write a new one for each job application.
2. Interests
Putting interests on your resume made you stand out — in 2006. Now, it says that you haven’t updated your resume since 2006. The original thinking was that interests would humanize you and make your resume more personal. But that was nearly 15 years ago, before everyone and their mother had active social media accounts — and before employers checked those social media accounts as a matter of course.
These days, if you’re applying to white-collar jobs, you probably have somewhere better to put your interests (like your personal website). If you’re applying to places with long hours and a high turnover rate (like retail, factory work, or food service), then including random, irrelevant interests makes you seem unreliable or unmotivated.
3. “Team Player”
This is one of those depressing little statistics that no one ever tells you: Mentioning “team player” in your resume means you are about 50% less hireable. Remove that phrase right now.
The reasoning behind it seems counter-intuitive. Don’t companies want employees who can work well together? Well, yeah, but in 2020, getting along with your coworkers (or at least not actively pissing them off) is the bare minimum. Playing nice is a given.
Instead, employers want to see that you can step up and spearhead a project or solve a problem without needing backup. Show yourself as a leader, not a follower. You must have been in charge of something at your job, whether it’s a department, a section, or a type of task. If you were the head of accounting, great! With other jobs, you have to be more creative. Maybe you totally ran the barista section alone, or maybe you were the only groomer who could handle cranky cats. That’s leadership!
Try to reframe your responsibilities with leadership-type verbs like Started, Led, Managed, Drove, Trained, Initiated, and Advanced. Do your best to get rid of follower-type ones like Followed, Assisted, Collaborated, Supported, Conformed, and Complied. Sometimes it will be impossible; sometimes you really did just help out. A good rule of thumb is to use one follower-type verb per two previous positions. Your goal is removing both the “team player” phrase and “team player” attitude from your resume.
4. Multiple Columns
Strap in; this explanation is a long one. If you’ve been in the job hunt for longer than five minutes, then you know that your resume has a high chance of getting scanned by a computer algorithm before being seen by a real, live person. Those programs are called Application Tracking Systems, or ATS, and you can read about them more here.
ATS have historically been very bad at reading resumes that use multiple columns. One of the reasons is that ATS are trained to read from top to bottom, left to right. Multiple columns mess up that natural flow, both for human readers and algorithmic software.
Take a look at this brilliantly marked-up snip from a resume template:
The Education title is on the same line as Experience. The ATS reads from left to right and sees that there is no plain text after Education. So it thinks you don’t have an educational history. It keeps reading and sees Experience, which it easily recognizes as a new category name. The program creates a new section and fills it in with the plain text that immediately follows. In this case, your degree name and date earned, followed by a job title and company name.
This is really really bad if the software is programmed to reject applicants without college degrees. First it misreads your resume and ignores your educational history. Then the program automatically disqualifies you for not having a degree.
If you’ve got multiple columns in your resume, go back and take a look at which category names share a line. If you have a sinking feeling of horror, that is totally normal! You’ve been designing your resume for human eyes. Or perhaps you used a resume template that’s more about showing off the word processor program’s capabilities instead of getting you past the resume-scanning software.
Take a deep breath. Exhale. What’s done is done. Get rid of your columns tonight and start applying to more jobs tomorrow, knowing that you have spectacularly improved your resume with this one change.
5. “References Available Upon Request.”
Mentioning references on your resume is an outdated tactic. You don’t need to say that your references are available on request; your references should be available on request. Delete that line and use the extra space for interesting, relevant information.
6. Or Worse, Actual References!
Your resume is a summary of your accomplishments. If your most impressive achievement is name-dropping someone else, that doesn’t bode well for your own work. It says “Hey, I can’t fill up a single full page with my own professional history.” Plus, some ATS programs scan specifically for mentions of high-profile companies. Another shady ATS secret? Yep!
Companies can filter for candidates who have had industry experience at name-brand organizations. So if you’re working in news production, for example, your resume might be scanned for mentions of NBC or CNN or even ESPN. If the software gets a hit, you get ranked higher. But that’s only a superficial bump: once a human reviewer gets to your resume, they’ll see your only connection to ESPN is knowing someone else who has experience there. And guess who has a good chance of getting blacklisted for wasting the hiring department’s time? (Hint: It’s not your connection at ESPN.)
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