I had lunch with my friend Mary recently, and together we looked over her resume.
"You worked for Astor Graphics for six months in 2007," I said. "That's not a long time. Why don't you drop that out, show your 2005-2006 job followed by your current job, and leave out the short-term gig entirely?"
"Oh! So it's OK to lie on my resume?" asked Mary.
Rewriting your resume to nuke a short-term job from your history isn't lying -- it's editing! You can decide which jobs to include in your resumes, and which to delete and forget. The easiest-to-read resumes with the most obvious career "stories" are the ones most likely to get a hiring manager's attention. Extraneous information and potentially off-putting items like six-month gigs are baggage we can and should unload.
Job-seekers can use these five quick and easy resume-boosting tips to make sure their resumes are hitting the mark:
Poof! No Resume Gap
Many of us have time periods we'd love to downplay in our resumes. Those might be short-term assignments or periods where we dropped out of the workforce. If the whole gap or forgettable job fits into the same calendar year, we can drop it off the resume entirely. Use years, rather than months (2005-2009 in place of June 2005-April 2009) to make those under-one-year gaps or mini-jobs vanish.
Consolidate Assignments
The typical resume of a big-company veteran is full of endless descriptions of meanderings from one job to another. Unless these same-company jobs are truly distinct from one another, no one cares when you moved from Desk A to Cubicle B. You can consolidate your jobs inside one employer under the heading "Marketing Roles" or "Operations Assignments" without giving us chapter and verse on each assignment.
Draw Us a Picture
Most of us know what the folks at IBM, Kraft, Google and other brand-name employers do. If we've never heard of your past employer, the first thing we want to know from you is, "What do they do in that company?" Use a "framing statement" at the beginning of each job description to tell us what the employer did:
Global Supply Company
Inventory Manager 2006-present
Global Supply is the Midwest's largest distributor of heating and cooling equipment to contractors. As Inventory Manager I was responsible for managing $1M in equipment and coordinating deliveries and outbound shipments among our 45 suppliers and 400+ contractor clients.
Lose the Jargon
Twenty-five percent of the words in a typical resume are useless corporate jargon, terms like "Task-oriented manager" and "cross-functional collaborator." These terms suck the energy from our resumes and waste space that should go to telling quick, pithy stories. "I got our X-15 product distributed by the country's top three resellers" beats "Results-oriented professional" any day.
Add a Human Voice
Your resume is your marketing document. Who wants to sound like everyone else? Wherever you can add a bit of yourself to your resume, do it!
"I love to tackle a chaotic office and lower the panic and stress levels" is more human and more specific than the overused "attention to detail." If you're struggling to add a human voice to your resume, talk to a friend about your career aspirations and your strengths, and ask him or her to repeat back what you said.
Employers will appreciate the you that a human-voiced resume offers!
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