Ex-Google recruiter says don't put these 3 things in your CV: 'Not allowed...'
There are a lot of pros and cons about what you should put on your resume, but there are some things to be avoided, says former Google recruiter Nolan Church.
If you are looking for a job, here are some mistakes that you simply must not make in your CV that will make HR execs throw it into the trash. The point before every employee while writing about their achievements is how much of their own trumpet can they blow before it becomes unsavoury for those whose job it is to sift through dozens of CVs to pick the best person for the job advertised. While listing positives is important, going overboard is not. And here, we list 3 things that must never be mentioned.
Shedding some light and dispersing the confusion is a former Google recruiter Nolan Church. Currently, he is the CEO of salary data company FairComp. And he lists as many as three things that employees must simply not do in order to improve their chances of getting hired.
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Long-winded sentences.
Saying that HR executives will barely be spending three-to-five seconds glancing at resumes, Church told CNBC Make It, “All of these sentences should be less than 25 words maximum.” Why so? He says, “Because the goal of a resume is for me to very quickly understand what you’ve done.” He concluded by saying, “Time is the enemy in life and is the enemy in business.”
Keeping it simple
Do not complicate the way you present the job that you did and all that it entailed. The job description has to be simple. Church puts it in a flowery way by saying, employees ″have this word salad….” that needs to be avoided. Putting it all across in “…one sentence would be a bad move,” and instead of that he recommends bullet points under job titles. “You’re not allowed to use more than one keyword in a sentence,” he added further.
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Forget tasks
An absolute no-no for Church was the mention of tasks that you did in your job. Church says, the focus should instead be on providing “…a concrete sense of what you accomplished and how you helped the business move forward.” The one example of a task that he frequently comes across is about meetings. He said, “The one I see all the time that just blows my mind is ‘coordinated meetings with X’. There’s literally no business impact for coordinating meetings.”
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Church said people should instead highlight how they really helped their companies, including landing new deals and overachieving goals. He recommended backing these up by mentioning everything in terms of numbers.
