Career experts say hiring managers only look at résumés for a few seconds, so job seekers need to get it right to avoid the dreaded rejection email.
What kind of personal details should you leave out? Do you need buzzwords and jargon?
There’s a ton of advice available about what to include and leave out of your résumé. Business Insider spoke with a few career experts about common résumé mistakes and drew on their insights to develop a quiz.
Take the following quiz to see whether you can find common résumé mistakes.
It’s hard out there for job seekers in the low-hire, low-fire labor market of the last few years. The US unemployment rate has remained low, but the hires rate of 3.3% is comparable to the early 2010s when unemployment was much higher after the Great Recession. Almost 2 million people have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks, or long-term unemployed.
How has your job search been going? How many jobs have you applied to, what strategies have you tried, and how has your financial situation changed, if at all? Reach out to this reporter to share at [email protected].
It’s tough to stand out in just a few seconds, especially if people are including the same keywords and jotting down similar experiences and qualifications. People turning to AI to craft the perfect job application can make it even tougher to stand out.
Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover reported earlier this year that Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of Twill, a recruiting software company, finds AI-edited résumés are similar to restaurant menus. Volberg said, “the menu looked really beautiful and had all these amazing ingredients and dishes, but there was no one there actually making the food.”
Some companies don’t care much about résumés when making their next pick. Hoover reported about a job post from Expensify that said, “Resume not your thing? That’s great, we don’t really read them anyway!” and noted a few questions that people should answer to be considered for the gig.
Priya Rathod, former workplace trends editor at Indeed, previously told Business Insider that AI can be a tool in the job search process but cautioned against giving it full control, especially since materials should still feel personal.
“Use AI as a collaborator,” Rathod said. “You potentially write your résumé out, and then you use AI to tweak it, strengthen it, make your existing bullets clearer.”
