10 Things You Should Never Include In A Resume

Your resume is a marketing document that needs to help you land your next role.

A lot of my clients believe that their resume needs to show everything that they’ve done, while, in fact, your resume is a targeted document for a specific position.

Every word on the resume should have the same goal – passing the ATS, landing an interview, getting an offer. So, the first thing you should do before writing or rewriting your resume is to have a clear goal in mind.

Depending on your goal, you would include different skills, brand yourself differently, and perhaps expand on different roles from your professional experience. And you would even include different additional relevant information depending on the position you are targeting.

Dos and don’ts of additional information in a resume

Relevant elements you want to include:

• Non-profit organizationsx
• Volunteering experience
• Language proficiency
• Technical skills
• Professional affiliations
• Honors and awards
• Training or continuing education
• Hobbies and interests that may show leadership, character, or qualities you feel are beneficial to your career

Some of the resume elements you want to avoid:

• Old irrelevant projects
• Irrelevant skills
• Testimonials from clients
• Irrelevant certifications
• Expired license
• Casual language
• Job performance reviews
• Random interests such as walking on the beach, reading books, etc.
• Personal details such as marital status, having children, date of birth, etc
• Any religious, recreational, or political information in nature

Different needs for different roles

Depending on the role you are applying for, you might want to include some other relevant information here. For example, for academia and government roles, candidates need to show a bit more about their accomplishments, and have a more detailed document. Some of the elements that one might put in their additional information section, in this case, would be:

• Publications
• Patents
• Research
• Projects
• Seminars
• Workshops

You won’t get far with generic information

Something that all career coaches and resume writers talk about is customization.

There is no one perfect resume for all of your applications. And that includes your additional relevant information section as well. You want to pay close attention to the job descriptions and see what they care about.

You can take it one step further and find more about the company’s culture through networking. Do they care about volunteering? Are they sponsoring certain non-profit organizations? You want to know as much as you can about a future employer in order to impress them with your resume.

If you are not sure what to do with your resume or LinkedIn profile, upgrade to All-Access and schedule a call with me so we can discuss it further.