Most common mistakes on fresher resumes

Looks matter, but details matter more.

With so many fancy-looking resume templates out there on the internet, it is easy to pay a lot of attention to how to present your resume. Do not be swayed by the colors and cool fonts that you see on the resume templates. Even if you spent 10% of the time you spend looking for your resume template on the content instead, you would have served your job prospects very well.

Why it matters to have no errors on your resume?

Especially, if you are a recent college graduate, your odds of getting an interview call after you submit your resume is going to heavily depend on the little information you present. You would not have the luxury of several years of work experience the experienced candidates would have. So, it is common sense to think that whatever little information you have on your resume, it is presented in an error-free manner as possible.

We are not talking about the order in which your skills are presented; order in which you list your skills matter to some extent but not as much as presenting information without grammatical and spelling errors, and in a manner it is easily digestible for the reviewer.

Too may resumes have errors

Before I started taking up freelance opportunities, I used to be an HR executive across several leading multinational companies. My friends never believed me when I told them simply there are so many jobs that are open at any given point of time. That number used to run in hundreds across some large organizations I used to be part of. It was unfortunate given how many fresh college graduates and experienced candidates alike who were unsuccessfully applying to these open positions.

So, where was the disconnect you might wonder. The disconnect usually lay in how commanding the resumes submitted by the candidates were in telling the HR executives and the automated applicant tracking systems why they were good candidates to the job they are applying to and why they should get an interview calls. Sadly, nearly all the resumes the HR executives get, let's say approximately about 95% of the resumes were carelessly written and applied hastily.

Common mistakes on fresher resumes

There are several mistakes that we see repeatedly occur across fresher resumes, but these 5 are the most common that we see as hiring mangers on fresher resumes.

Mistake No. 1: Poor Structure

If not properly laid out, a poor layout jumps out immediately when you open the resume.

Unless you are someone who has a few patents or a noteworthy individual in a field in which your potential employer operates, the chances of your resume making it past the reviewer is very slim.

Some examples of poor structure incudes, large empty spaces between sections, no care whatsoever to the margins, sections getting cut abruptly during page breaks and unnecessarily lengthy resumes.

There are only a few ways in which you can organize your resume's structure. There is no need to get too fancy in the name of building up a good looking resume. Looks matter until they interfere with the content of the resume.

If you a recent college graduate without internship or a bunch of freelance projects to talk about on your resume, chances are you do not need to tweak up your resume structure a lot. No HR executive will reject your resume for structure, but they might miss out on catching that single skill you have that might be a good fit to the role you are applying to. Why would they miss out - well, if the structure of your resume is hiding away that skill.

The best resume structure is the one that does not surprise the reviewer a lot and not for a long time. So, stick to proven, straight forward template styles and stay away from fancy background images that steal the limelight away from your skills and accomplishments.

There is no reason for your resume to be more than one page long for a typical role in a business setting. The employer is not interested in your biography; they are just interested in what your skills are and some proof of having applied those skills in some capacity.

Mistake No. 2: Lack of Personalization

Just like a poor layout, a poorly-personalized resume will announce itself immediately that you created your resume in 5 min, possibly just changing key details of your buddy's resume.

Having been a HR professional myself, I can you tell you how quickly HR professionals can sense that the candidate didn't bother to spend time on their resume.

A likely reason why a lot of fresh graduates in India often copy their friend's resume is often students prioritize look over content. Do not make the mistake of just changing name and contact information on your friend's resume and call it yours. It stands out.

One area where lack of personalization will immediately show is in the career objective statement. It will be so apparent if you only changed the skills section and copied over someone else's career objective statement. They will look so disjointed that even if it is hard to put in words, the feeling of inconsistent objective statement and the list of skills is unmissable

The second area where lack of personalization shows up immediately in how the candidate describes their achievements in the experience and projects section. A poorly personalized achievements content usually lacks conviction, quantification of results and will have cliched statements without elaborating on how the results were achieved.

Mistake No. 3: Grammatical Errors

There aren't ATS applications ready (yet) to parse resumes written in Hindi, or at least not in use widely so I presume you would write your resume in English.

Put yourself in the HR recruiters position. For every single position advertised on the jon site, hundreds of candidates apply. Would you be kind to the resume that several grammatical and spelling mistakes? Guess not!

To those that read this far - one tip is to pay special attention to those words that when misspelt still have some meaning and capitalized words.

Mistake No. 4: Irrelevant Career Objective Statement

I have personally come across this mistake several times and unfortunately most of them are also from experienced professionals.

In the case of fresh graduates, the irrelevance occurs because the candidate just used the same resume for multiple job applications. The most catastrophic mistakes are mentioning you are applying to a role in X function but indeed you are applying to a Y function.

This mistake is easy to fix.

There are only a few things you need to ensure to avoid committing this mistake. Firstly, make sure to read the job description and identify the skills that are needed for the job. Secondly, make sure to rewrite your existing career objective statement to highlight the skills you already possess and the ones that the job demands. Lastly, remove from your career objective statement anything that is not needed to the job you are applying to. If you are tweaking up the statement you used for another job, make sure to remove any lingering references to the old application.

Mistake No. 5: Missing Skills

Skills are like the heart of your resume, especially since many fresh graduates would not have had the opportunity to pursue even an unpaid internship.

Skills do not mean accomplishments, meaning as long as you can contribute to creating something, you can claim to have that skill. The level of proficiency varies so do not be bothered by how well you know something.

For example, you may be wondering whether to include Excel in your resume as a technical skill since you are thinking you are not very proficient in index matching. As long as you can create tables, and edit an excel file for formulas, you should feel comfortable to include excel as a technical skill on your resume.

It is hard to think of a domain that does not welcome resumes that have skills grouped under technical and soft skills. Because of this reason, I generally suggest that the candidates split the whole set of skills into Technical and Soft skills. All job functions require some technical skills. It is common for less-informed candidates to think technical skills means programming, but it is not. The word Technical applies broadly and simply put, it is all skills that are required and that makes someone qualified in a particular field. For example, if you are a lawyer applied to an attorney position in a law firm, then your technical skills are going to be which area of the legal profession you have special skills in. It could be, for example, intellectual property rights or corporate law or even insurance arbitration.

While soft skills are easier to understand, one needs to be strategic about which soft skills to include on their resume. Given they are easy to understand, it is also very easy to think you should include all soft skills you think you possess. Do not make this mistake.

A careful reading of the job description is usually good enough to pick out the soft skills that are required and the relative importance among the soft skills that should be included. For example, if you are considering applying to a Customer Service Associate position, the job description might possibly include team work, leadership, problem solving, reporting, analytical thinking, etc. If you have gained analytical skills through training and certification, you may be tempted to put your analytical thinking right on top of the list, but given this is a Customer Service role, you might be better off listing leadership, problem solving and customer focus as a top skills and then include analytical skills.

Conclusion

As long as you stay clear of these most common mistakes, you would have done yourself and your career prospects a big favour by helping your resume end up in the right pool of profiles queued for further processing. What a waste of effort it would be to spend so much time finding a contact via your network who could help you get a referral but ruin all of opportunities by sending a resume that suffers from these common mistakes.