When it comes to resume-writing, spell-check is something but it's not enough

I can't tell you how many resumes I've looked at in my career. My guess would be tens of thousands. At least. I've received a paper resume with cute stickers on it. I've received two versions of the same persons resume with completely different dates of employment. I've seen lots and lots of unnecessary head shots. And I've seen many people make the same mistakes over and over again.

I have no doubt that in most cases, people would be mortified if they knew they were making mistakes on the one document intended to communicate their professional accomplishment (and attention to detail) to a prospective employer. But I think many of these mistakes escape notice until the resume is in front of a recruiter. I'm not sure why, but I could always spot the word "manger" on a resume, where the candidate meant "manager".

Back when we were kids, we had different activities where we were assigned a buddy. We looked out for each other, right? We need resume buddies. I recommend that you get one; someone to read your resume for word selection and grammar issues, and for clarity. Someone to stop you from using all those acronyms that became your native tongue while working at Microsoft. Cease and desist, I insist.

Another thing to keep in mind: there's a good chance the search-able version of your resume is going to lose its formatting, as resumes are converted to ASCII for storage. It's unfortunate that the beautiful layout you took hours to create is not visible in this version. The best case scenario is that your resume looks plain. The worst case: it it's completely unreadable because you used some wingding-type business. This "for dummies" page has some of the things you should avoid when creating a resume. Cliffs Notes version: no fancy characters or formatting and everything must read from left to right.

And if you don't mind me giving you a little resume pep-talk...

Everyone hates writing a resume, everyone feels like they are bad at it. I've always said that the best resume writers are the people that keep needing to find a new job. If your resume does a good job of representing your skills but your formatting looks like everyone else's, you're doing just fine.