Common resume problems

“I’ve gotten a lot of advice on how to write it, mostly from my staff. They really seem to be on top of this stuff. They tell me I have to use the active voice for the resume. You know, things like ‘Commanded US Armed Forces.’ “, “Ordered airstrikes”, “He served as president for three terms. Everyone embellishes a bit.”

-President Bill Clinton, White House Correspondents Dinner, April 29, 2000

As a professional who reviews resumes frequently, I see a deluge of resumes from different people with different backgrounds every week.

In general, the college student/recent grad resumes I see fall into 1 of 2 categories: they’re very impressive and don’t need a lot of work other than minor formatting issues, or they’re good but have some common issues.

Common problems

The two most common problems I’ve seen are not being specific enough and not focusing on results. If your resume says “Information and Research Collected,” reviewers might rightly think that you yourself don’t know exactly what your responsibilities were.

Focusing on results is just as important – why would anyone hire you if you can’t get results?

Resume Enhancement Example

Here’s a good example of what NOT to write on your resume, if you’re applying for financial services jobs:

“-Investigated Acquisition Goals in the Construction and Homebuilding Industries”.

This isn’t specific enough and doesn’t give me any idea how you did it, what your process was, or what the results of your work were.

What resources did you use to research them? Did you talk to experts? Reference to the Wall Street Journal? What criteria did you use to make the final selections? Returned? Cost effectiveness? Scale? Management teams?

Those are all the crucial details left out of this example.

Here is an improved version:

“-Researched over 100 acquisition targets in the construction and homebuilding industries using Capital IQ and Factset and narrowed the list down to the top 10 companies. Used financial selection criteria such as revenue growth and EBITDA margins I also used qualitative criteria such as market dynamics in construction sub-segments, strength of management teams, and exposure to subprime mortgages.”

This is much better than the first version, but it could still use some improvement: the results of your work. What did you spend all those hours on, if not for the results?

Sometimes people say they don’t know what the results were or can’t relate anything directly to their work. If this is the case, be creative and get results.

I’m not suggesting you lie, but as Bill Clinton points out above, sometimes you have to exaggerate a bit. Don’t suggest that the beautiful Excel chart of his resulted in $1 million additional revenue, but to claim that it improved efficiency or saved time/money is fine.

Here’s an example of how we could add a focus on results to this example:

“-Researched over 100 acquisition targets in the construction and homebuilding industries using Capital IQ and Factset and narrowed the list down to the top 10 companies. Used financial selection criteria such as revenue growth and EBITDA margins “I also used qualitative criteria such as market dynamics in construction sub-segments, strength of management teams, and subprime exposure. As a result, the private equity firm did additional due diligence on 3 of the companies.”

I admit that this is a bit of an exaggeration; in this particular case, it would be quite difficult to say what the true results were.

And sometimes you may not be able to determine the results. But if your resume doesn’t have a single mention of results anywhere, you can definitely find a few instances where you do have tangible results and expand on them.