Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses three things job hunters should never put on their resume yet commonly do.
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I want to talk with you today about 3 things to never put on your resume.
1. Objective. “I want to work for a progressive organization where I can rise through the ranks and reach my…” Cut it out! No one reads objectives.. If anything, they are only used to disqualify you for being stupid. Get rid of the object.
2. References are available upon request. It is filler. Everyone knows it is filler. You are trying to balance out the appearance of your resume and had nothing else to say. Get rid of it. We know the references are available upon request. You don’t have to tell us that.
3. This is a biggie especially for you senior people. Get rid of the stuff from 20 years ago. As a matter of fact, in most cases you get rid of the stuff from 15 years ago. It is extraordinarily unusual. If you are ever going to be hired based upon things that you did 15 or 20 years ago.
If you are, in most cases, you want to keep it a secret. After all, you will be taking a huge step backward professionally. Instead, focus in and give the most space to the current work. The further that you go back in time, the less information that you want to provide. Frankly, the older it is, the less valuable it is to the employer.
From their perspective, how much do you think they believe you really remember from 15 or 20 years ago? Next to nothing, of course. Why submit your resume for jobs that require experience that you had from the Stone Ages?
Firms aren’t going to care for it. They are not going to believe it. Get it off your resume altogether!
Maybe you have a sentence or 2, but you are not going to try to really find work based upon stuff (let me use an example of an IT person) work that you did as a programmer back in The Stone Ages… You don’t remember how he did it. You could reconstructed and they don’t have the technology from 20 years ago. Get rid of it.
So, no objectives, no “references are available upon request,” and certainly nothing from 15 to 20 years ago.
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Do you really think employers are trying to help you?
You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
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