Don't Make These Mistakes on Your Resume and Cover Letter

When you're competing in the job market, you don't necessarily need to be the best qualified - you need to LOOK the best qualified, so you can prove it in the interview. Errors on your resume and cover letter can get you automatically disqualified before HR has even considered your qualifications. (This happened to a friend of mine - she was at the interview when they spotted one spelling error on the resume, and that was the end of the interview).

Here's what you need to know.

1. Have people you trust look over your resume and cover letter for typos, misspellings, and other errors. Don't trust spellcheck or other computer programs to catch everything, because they won't.

2. When capitalizing words, remember, only capitalize proper nouns (Paris, Microsoft, Stratocaster - as opposed to city, software, electric guitar), the beginning of sentences, and titles (but not short prepositions or a/an unless they're the first word.

Examples: A Walk to Remember, A Tale of Two Cities, The Fountainhead, When in Rome, Sleepless in Seattle, Of Mice and Men

3. Make sure your bullet points "agree".

For example

Managed budgets up to $100KSupervised up to 50 staff members

Not

Managed budgets up to $100KSupervision of up to 50 staff members.

Since "managed" is a past-tense verb, all the first words should be past tense verbs. "Supervision" is a noun and therefore doesn't agree. Also note the period at the end of the last bullet. Whether you choose to put periods at the end of your bullet points is up to you, however, pick one and stick to it throughout the resume. Also, bullet points don't have to be complete sentences. And be careful about the number of bullet points. If you only have one or two, just make it a normal, unbulleted sentence. If you have more than five, try combining a couple and take out extra words. Aim for three to five.

3. Use a professional email address - something that reflects your name. Skip the "hotmama69@email.com" or "fantasyfootballstar@email.com". "Jane.Doe@email.com, or jdoe, or jane.doe27 (if there are a lot of Jane Doe type addresses). Use that address for everything job related.

4. Do not include anything on your resume that would indicate something that could be used to illegally discriminate: age (so if you graduated from college in 1969 you might want to leave the date off), race, ethnicity (Member of the Italian American Association), sexual orientation, or disability.

5. Don't put your references on your resume (for their privacy). You don't even need to include the line "References available upon request." It's superfluous - everyone has references and employers are already planning to ask for them once they interview you.

Hi, I'm Maria, The Working Girl. Check out my blog, http://workinggirlworld.wordpress.com/ for up-to-date, valuable information on competing in today's job market, and feel free to leave a comment if there's something you'd like me to write about!