When submitting your resume to a prospective employer, you want the reader to focus on your experience, skills, and accomplishments, but not its outdated look. In today’s rapidly changing world, it is critical to provide the impression to the reader that you are “on trend” and familiar with the latest styles. Remember that your resume is not for you, but rather for the recruiter or hiring manager who will be reviewing and assessing you based on the document.
Submitting an outdated looking resume can be particularly challenging for a more chronologically senior candidate who already has to deal with potential age biases. It can also make it appear that you just have not placed enough effort into the document to keep it updated and modern. Neither of these scenarios is a good look for you.
There are a number of things that job seekers still include or do with their resume that will make it seem outdated. Let’s now take a look at what you should avoid or do in order to make sure that your resume is as fresh and modern appearing as possible.
• Edit Your Contact Information: It is 2024, so be sure to include your mobile phone and professional social media link. There is not much more you need to include beyond this information. You can omit your full mailing address, since the days of sending postal information to a candidate is a thing of the past.
• Delete Your “Objective Statement”: In what may be the most pleasant change, the antiquated “objective statement” has been moved to the scrap heap. It used to be that everybody had the same couple of sentences stating that we wanted a challenging and rewarding position with a growing company that will allow us to make a difference. Of course, we feel that way…why wouldn’t we want that? So, other than taking up valuable resume space, it never really added any value.
• Add Qualifications or Competencies List: To replace the deleted “objective statement”, most job seekers are adding a summary list of qualifications or competencies. Now this does add value for a reader because it quickly provides a summary of the candidate, allowing a quick assessment.
• Avoid Too Much Writing: Modern writing is all about key words, action verbs and numbers or statistics. An outdated resume will be text heavy, written in a narrative type of style. A modern resume will be more outlined and list-like, with an emphasis on the items noted above. So, if you watch your length, depending on your experience and the position you are seeking, then your resume should normally be 1-2 pages. Most hiring managers will not spend the time to read a four-page resume and will likely just place it automatically in the discard pile.
• Omit the Personal Details: Recruiters don’t want to know about your marriage status and how many children that you have. In today’s world, that is actually information for employment law, reasons that they would prefer NOT to know during the hiring process. The same goes for including a photo of yourself on your resume. If they really want to see what you look like, they can view your social media profile. Furthermore, most recruiters really are not interested in your hobbies, especially if they are more dated endeavors such as coin collecting and needlepoint.
• No Dated Skills or Qualifications: It is tempting to list every software program learned and any seminar attended. However, if this information dates you, then leave this information off the resume. For example, you can remove your knowledge of such programs as Quattro, Word Star, etc. At this point, even writing MS Office is irrelevant, since almost everyone has at least a serviceable skill level in it.
• Limit Different Formats or Fonts: One of the dangers of making small edits over and over with your resume is you run the risk of not being consistent each time. Your document should have the same font (and font size) and identical margins.
While it is important to have the most informative and compelling resume possible, you also want to make sure your document looks modern and not outdated. Luckily, the most common changes to a resume format and content have been relatively small and definitely rooted in common sense. So, it should not take someone long to update their current resume and make it appear like it has just been written using the most recent standard.
As always, best of luck in your job search.
The following has been prepared for the general information of WNYJobs readers. It is not meant to provide advice with respect to any specific legal or policy matter and should not be acted upon without verification by the reader.
Joe Stein
WNY Human Resources Professional
Feel free to contact Joe Stein regarding questions or comments at:
Joe Stein
