Tom Henkel
First, articles virtually identical to this one have appeared dozens and dozens of times here on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the Internet. If you want to get noticed, why not write about a fresh topic or, at the very least, take a different angle on this topic to differentiate it? Second, every person on LinkedIn could compile a list of annoying things that happen with frustrating regularity on their jobs. Maybe other HR people cheer these resume perfection articles, but to everyone else it sounds like incessant whining. The millionth article complaining about typos in resumes (this article might be a candidate for that title) isn't going to fix the problem. People don't purposefully put typos in resumes just to annoy HR people (although it's a temptation). It's a mistake. It happens. Deal with it. Third, when you reject candidates for violating crazy rules, who are you hurting? The candidates will probably find jobs somewhere. You're just arbitrarily removing potentially qualified candidates from consideration by your company for nonsensical reasons. Some of those candidates might turn out to be star performers who add great value to your competitors. Does a software engineer need perfect grammar and spelling to do his/her job? When that candidate develops a billion dollar product for your competitors are you going to feel proud for rejecting them in the name of resume perfection? Your job is to hire the best available talent for your company. It's not about finding candidates that don't annoy you. Lastly, and I do agree lying is a bad thing, when you invent a system that automatically rejects resumes for lacking every keyword you desire, aren't you setting up scenario to promote lying? Isn't it equally dishonest for a company to demand more skills than is necessary to reasonably qualify for any given position?

Aga (Agnieszka) Panicz Bridging Gaps: Education - Talent Recognition & Development - Career Development

Laszlo Bock, I have a better idea for your future post - write about the biggest mistakes companies make on their job postings and then in the recruitment process. #1 Job descriptions are full of typos and the formatting of job descriptions (especially the ones posted on LinkedIn) is appalling. #2 The length of most job descriptions + must-haves + should-haves + would-be-nice-to-haves is unbearable. #3 Companies notoriously lie about the roles, their values are there just to look pretty and they hardly ever, if ever, practice what they preach. #4 Go to a hiring manager's LinkedIn profile and you are bound to find typos. Even the LinkedIn Pulse posts are full of typos. #5 Since most companies use dumb software that looks for key words in applicants' resumes for pre-selection, so actually a resume of 4 or even 10 pages is a smart move - the more words you use on your resume the greater your chances are that you will go past the initial selection. #6 Also, I have just googled for 'executives fired for lying on their resumes' and I have come across this article http://readwrite.com/2012/05/03/10-executives-who-lied-on-their-resumes-and-2-who-got-away-with-it Finally, if you worked for me as a recruiter or hiring manager and eliminated "good or even great people" just because of typos, I would fire you! In the era when 'recruiting' is called 'talent acquisition' I would expect a bit more effort on the part of hiring managers in identifying talent.... unless you are hiring resume writes.

Stephanie Dailey, MBA
International Banking and Financial Services Consultant
The more articles like this I read, the more interested I am in growing my own business as opposed to turning myself into a robot trying to growing someone else's business. Good customers are so much easier to find than good jobs these days. Plus there's no difference anymore in the income sourcing process. If I network with 100 potential clients or send out 100 perfect resumes, I'm more likely to get a few good clients than one good job. Even better, if a client and I don't see eye to eye, its no big deal and I don't get negatively labeled as a job hopper for changing focus to new clients. Instead I'm seen as a prudent and skilled business woman

Brian Welk
Editor at CIO Talk Radio, Freelance News Editor Sound on Sight
With the exception of the last two, which are obvious red flags, the fact that resumes get very quickly thrown out because of a mild typo or because of a formatting issue is often the reason why companies neglect to hire good talent and wonder why anyone isn't rising to the top of the crust. Recruiters and HR people spend all of 7 seconds looking at a resume before throwing it out the window for the pettiest of things, and it's frankly an insult to the person who has spent a whole lot of time applying to that position. Larger companies have absurd portals where you have to type in your resume information multiple times such that a computer can filter through keywords and skills, and your resume that you have carefully tailored may as well have gone into a void. I once went into an interview and saw that the hiring manager had a version of my resume that I never formatted and that did not have current information. It came out of an algorithm or an HR person who doesn't truly know what the hiring manager would be looking for, and good people get lost in the shuffle. Frankly I've read too many articles that parrot the same ideas about how to fix your resume and make it perfect, and they're always written by people who barely devote the time to actually look at them.

Maria Johnsen
Strategic Marketing( SEO,PPC) Brand Management, IT & Operations
Right. Most of those whom got hired at major player companies were lairs, had long resumes and because of their networking connections their typos were overlooked. Your article is beautiful on paper but in practice these are not applicable in real life. Do you know what get people hired? Networking! [size=14pt] You have got to know someone who knows someone in the company.[/size] All other stuff you guys give people are bunch of beautiful words in well written articles. 15 years you have been working as a recruiter; have you ever put yourself in an applicant’s shoes? Do you know how many job applications they are filling out and sending out to employers/companies? This job hunting has become a 24/7 unpaid job. So don’t you dare to judge people for having a couple of typos in their applications. Specialty matters. Recruiters run these resumes through their software and at the end of the day they hire someone who is not qualified for the job, a year later, we see the same old job announcement all over again. Every single year I have seen companies look for the same job applicants and I see the same job applications. Do you know why? Because they follow all these cliché advice and do not pay attention to real qualification! Qualified people’s resumes are buried under fake ones and recruiters choose them and hire the wrong people. Then companies in their annual reports complain about losing money over recruiting processes, hiring wrong people and lack of the right specialists.

Brendan McInnis [LION]
Head of HR at Tightrope ►Read Scotland FREEDOM‽ Article◄
'Mistake 2: Length' - I'm going to respectfully challenge this one Not long ago, I would have agreed with the length guideline Laszlo Bock recommends above (1 page per 10 years of experience). Over the last 2 years leading HR at Tightrope and, specifically, using a couple of common Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to collect and manage resumes, I've changed my mind. I fully agree that the purpose of a resume is to get an interview. Laszlo's advice is great at the point that a human is actually reading it. However, the article skips over a critical point - even with Google's vaunted and well-resourced People Operations team, I think it's safe to say a human eye does not look at all 50,000 each week (please correct me by replying to the comment if I'm wrong about that). I'll admit my team and I don't look at every single resume either. Therefore, I now recommend a first page with a high-level summary for humans but also a decently-formatted additional page targeted primarily to the ATS that lists other skills in detail, ideally matching with many of the same terms in the job post that don't fit on the first page. Don't lie, but it's better to err on the side of listing relevant skills you have experience with, but are not be expert in, than not list them at all and get 'dinged' by the ATS scoring algorithm. Once you're in the interview process, you can discuss more about how important a skill is to the role and explain your level of competency to a human. This getting way too long for a comment, so I'll stop here and elaborate in my next LinkedIn article, as long as likes/replies to this comment indicate sufficient interest

Andrea Eskin
Writer / Editor / Graphic Designer
The worst offense is not having the courtesy to even send a computer-generated acknowledgement that a resume was received, followed later by an update telling the applicant that the job has been filled. Although some companies do this, most of them don't. If you think a typo reflects badly on one applicant, believe me, when he or she is ignored, it will reflect even worse on your company, and that person will communicate his disappointment to lots of other people. There are many software programs that make it easy for a company to contact, thank, and update an applicant about a job, so there's no excuse for ignoring people who have shown genuine interest in working for you, and invested valuable time and effort in sending you their resumes.

Brian Bailey
Education and Technology Consultant
OK - anyone see a problem with the hiring process?!!! Seriously, passing up a great candidate because of a minor typo is more than a little short-sighted in my humble opinion. Some companies seem to have forgotten (or never knew in the first place) that you might just be hiring the WRONG candidate simply because they didn't make any mistakes on their resume. We're all human and quite frankly, I don't think I would want to work for a company that operates in such a fashion. Cold, clinical and robotic. My father, who was a professor of education and trained hundreds of teachers and future superintendents, once told me that great teachers DO NOT get A's in Teachers' College. Great teachers usually have lower grades but WAY MORE life experience, including failure.

Ben Dundee
Data Scientist at Square Root, Inc.
I'd say this is fairly low value advice. Speaking as someone who reviews resumes for technical positions regularly: The biggest mistake I see on technical resumes is people concentrating on what they did, versus what they accomplished. I'll take spelling and formatting errors on a resume if the candidate is the kind of person who wows me with their accomplishments.

Brent Bates
★ Recruiter & Career Coach ★
Laszlo Bock, your 5 biggest mistakes selected are important, but I disagree that they are the biggest and very much disagree with a few of your suggestions. The #1 biggest mistake should be failure to customize the resume to show how you even meet the requirements of the job! #2 should be failure to demonstrate value through accomplishments, awards, achievements, results, whereas merely listing your duties/responsibilities will just make you look like a commodity, someone capable, when employers want only THE BEST! Several inaccuracies that I want to correct, to prevent a lot of job seekers reading this from hurting their job search chances are... LENGTH, the # of pages rule is misguided and misleading. Length of a resume should ALWAYS be whatever is necessary to CONCISELY mention in detail your top quantified accomplishments in each role and only relevant qualifications. With the way most Applicant Tracking Systems work these days, the benefits of a keyword-rich resume will get you found and ranked higher in recruiters' search results, far more important than an arbitrary length rule. PDF documents are HATED by many recruiters and ATSs. They are glitchy for copy/pasting and the format commonly gets screwed up in ATSs' resume preview functions. Your concerns about disclosing client names is flawed. As a hiring manager or recruiter, you cannot assume that disclosing client names for projects is a breach of confidential information. Many consulting or outsourcing companies publicly and proudly display the names of the client companies on their website to market their credibility. There's no way for you to know if that information is supposed to be protected.

Sharad Agrawal
Regional Transformation Lead at Alcatel-Lucent Telecoms
I wonder, when people start recruiting, why suddenly they start expecting robots to write CVs and 100% perfect candidates in perfect height, length, not a single typo and 100% factual. Please! Get real. If we start rejecting resumes because of typos, 50% of employed population would be unemployed. There is no perfect length and I bet you, if someone is recruiting by looking at formatting - I have come across some real beautiful CVs and faces that spoke to me were absolutely rubbish. In fact, I have a great team mate who is just not skilled in Microsoft Word - but I can sleep if I know he is dealing with an issue 'cause he is so committed and skilful. I am sorry, I don't appreciate a black and white approach to rejecting resumes

[b]Gennady Shenker
Creating value on teams that play to win
[b]Laslo, I very much appreciate your sentiment, but let me turn tables on you, may I? May I suggest that you and "hiring managers" waste their time on wrong candidates? Would you rather hire "Michael Jordan" of the profession, who chose to spent his time on polishing his "game" or someone who sacrificed enhancing his/her skill set for the sake of learning to play fake resume game? As a hiring manager I have a responsibility to find the best candidate for the job and not the master of the resume and interview. I am still to read a worthwhile advice on resume or interview on LinkedIn. So many experts, so few insights! I've read about tricky questions to ask. Unless you are in the business of answering tricky questions on a fly, what exactly do tricky questions test? I've read from the only question that matters to 5 that make a difference. Ask 100 recruiters/hiring managers of their interpretations of this "only" questions and you'll get 100 different interpretations. After interviewing 100+ candidates, I came to realization that I learn more about candidates from questions they ask then from canned answers to well known questions. Behavioral interviews became a competition between not professionals with the best capabilities for jobs at hand and in the foreseeable future but story makers and tellers. Unless making and telling stories are key drivers for success in your business, what use of tasting these skills during interviews? It's time recruiters and hiring managers got out of the fantasy land in their heads and back into reality. [/b]
and many more
read them up here https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140917045901-24454816-the-5-biggest-mistakes-i-see-on-resumes-and-how-to-correct-them?_mSplash=1

I didn't see this coming

Great! I was actually disappointed at the first article. Most organisations who put up fictitious requirements from job seekers already are inviting lies from jobseekers. Imagine a recruiter asking you for 10years of experience from doing a routine job when with just 1year on the job, you are good to go.

Be back to add more.

Brian Bailey
Education and Technology Consultant
OK - anyone see a problem with the hiring process?!!! Seriously, passing up a great candidate because of a minor typo is more than a little short-sighted in my humble opinion. Some companies seem to have forgotten (or never knew in the first place) that you might just be hiring the WRONG candidate simply because they didn't make any mistakes on their resume. We're all human and quite frankly, I don't think I would want to work for a company that operates in such a fashion. Cold, clinical and robotic. My father, who was a professor of education and trained hundreds of teachers and future superintendents, once told me that great teachers DO NOT get A's in Teachers' College. Great teachers usually have lower grades but WAY MORE life experience, including failure.

The emboldened it just what I LOVE!

dagr8:
Guy, that is not an excuse not to score A o

lol.. no not really. I love people who have passion for what they do, only those who have passion can turn out great! That's what I meant.

Dont mind these HR... What they ask for they get by candidates lying to meet d requirements. Why set 100% standard on resume/cv when you will still test d candidate using aptitude tests n various interview stages.

Even worse is the fact that most of these HR demanding the impossible got their position because they knew somebody who knows somebody

Lemme occupy this space for now. Will be back

alentyno: Lemme occupy this space for now. Will be back

FP sure die