Resumes. We all do it wrong.

Author

Vlad
February 04, 2024

Hello-hello, my dear subscribers!

I have never told you this story. Before I launched the Naiman Labs project, it all started with me advising my friends on how to shape their resumes better.

In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands of professionals from Russia started to seek ways to leave the country. The best way was to find a job abroad. I also was one of them.

I decided to combine my personal experience with some of my experience working in HR and recruitment to help people shape their profiles.

I reviewed dozens of profiles and realized that I could help more people by providing career tips and advice. This is how the Naiman Labs project was created.

Since launching Naiman Labs, I have been creating content and consulting people to improve their profiles and prepare for the job search.

Over the recent year, I have reviewed more than 150 different resumes and LinkedIn profiles, and I want to highlight several very common mistakes I see while people do their resumes.

I group them into 3 buckets:

  1. Understanding

  2. Content

  3. Formatting

Understanding 🧠

The most common mistakes I see here are misunderstandings of the purpose of a resume as a document and the hiring process.

Here’s a sneak peek from behind the scenes.

You fall into the screening process when you submit your resume to the company. Screening can be done by a professional recruiter (in-house or agency) and by resume scanning / ATS (application tracking system) solutions. In other words, your resume can be reviewed by a human reviewing different profiles in bulk (at least 50 resumes per day) or by a robot 🤖

That's why you don't need to overcomplicate the format. There are dozens of different beautiful, fancy resume templates on the internet. People claim to get tired of formalities and boring resumes.

You don't really need this. It should be clean, easy to read, well-designed, but not "fancy".

ProTip: there's one exception, though. If you give your resume directly to a person hiring you, you might want to show them your fancy resume since they don't review many profiles.

Another mistake is a misunderstanding of the resume's purpose. Resume is your first presentation, and it has two main purposes:

  • Get you to the job interview - you need to pass the screening step

  • Give a high-level understanding to any person looking at your resume about your work experience

That's why you don't need to add your entire experience to your resume. You don't want to add every responsibility or every single work detail. Because nobody will be reading your 5-pages document and because you want to leave interesting details for your interviews and cover letters.

Content 📝

Your resume should describe your previous experience.

In general, it should tell every hiring person what you can do well. The best way to do this is to describe your achievements.

I often see mistakes when people describe their responsibilities instead of achievements.

Feel the difference:

  • Responsibility: "Customers data collection and analysis for various dashboards"

  • Achievement: "Created a set of dashboards for the department providing real-time information on customers’ behavior that led to an increase of the deals conversion to XX %"

Another very common mistake comes from natural people's laziness.

Everyone wants to create a one-fit-for-all resume. However, we have to tailor it not for every vacancy but for every role we apply. I often see when people describe their experience equally with pretty much the same level of detail.

I always advise people to pay more attention to their most relevant experience even though they did something great in that job 10 years ago.

Formatting 💅

The biggest mistake you can make here is that it is unimportant. Well, it is.

Imagine:

  • You apply for a data analyst role and claim attention to detail as one of your strongest competencies, and you have some typos in your resume.

  • You apply for a designer role and mistakenly have different fonts in your resume.

  • You apply for a salesperson role and cannot create a selling resume, a.k .a. a written proposal.

Most common formatting mistakes I see:

1️⃣ Typos. Just don't. Use Grammarly, Chat GPT, read your resume with your friend, and just get rid of typos.

2️⃣ All resume text in the same font size and format. A good practice is to highlight the most significant achievements, metrics, or some information in bold. It won't matter to a robot, but it will help a recruiter to notice how cool you are 😎.

3️⃣ Weird file naming. Name it right. Your file name should have the following:

  • Your name

  • The role you think about (it may be generic, but describing overall)

  • Date (year/month of update)

  • Document type: resume / cover letter / portfolio

✅ Good file name: "Tim Cook_CEO_Resume_012024"

❌ Bad file name: "Elon_resume"; "Elon"; "Untitled.pdf"

Your goal here is to make it easier for the people who might refer you to understand the document and quicker for them to find and share when they have it.

4. No formatting. Some of the profiles I saw were just plain text. It doesn't work like this. You need to format and structure your resume. It should have a clear work history, education, name, and contact details. Just spend some effort structuring and formatting.

That’s it for today!

Have a great week ahead!

Vlad from Naiman Labs

Things I love this week

I discovered the joy of Readwise. I used this app only to facilitate my highlighting process. Readwise allows you to save your highlights from the books and articles you read and export them to the note-taking app.

But there’s more, and the Readwise app helps you renew your highlights on a daily basis. This can spark additional thoughts and ideas, and it feels great.

💡 If you want to try Readwise you can use my affiliate link and get an extra month for free.

This is my first consequent week:

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