10 Resume Mistakes That Might Cost You Your Dream Job

Today we're going to go over 10 resume mistakes that might cost you your dream job. Yesterday my Biospace column dropped and I went over these in detail there. But some people love to listen, so I'm going to go over them here and maybe go into a little bit more detail about each of them. These are things that my team and I see on a weekly basis. So these are not obscure mistakes that only a few people are making. We see them all the time. Some of them will probably surprise you. So let's go over these mistakes and how you can avoid them so your resume is not getting trashed. I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm.

I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and.

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I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're.

In the right place. First, I want to give a really important disclaimer. These tips are for US Based jobs only. Every country has slightly different customs around resume formatting resume norms. So if you are applying in another country, please do your research and make sure that you're not committing faux pas there. This segment is strictly for US based jobs. Mistake number one, we see often from international candidates which is including a profile picture. This is a big mistake because we don't want to introduce bias into our process at any point really, but especially at that early resume stage. Now I can tell you that we are not supposed to be making any decisions based on people's looks and I can also tell you that human beings are human beings. If you include a picture it could potentially sway somebody's decision. And a lot of the time when we get these pictures they look a little bit more like mug shots. And I think again this is country specific. So often candidates are not smiling in these pictures and in the United States it is a big deal to smile in your pictures and make eye contact with the camera. So save your picture for the LinkedIn profile. But I do encourage you to look up how to put your best foot Forward in a LinkedIn profile picture as well. Because often the comments I get from hiring managers when we get a picture that's up at the top of a resume and it's an unsmiling candidate is this looks like a mug shot. And that is not the first impression you want to make when you're submitting a resume. So no picture on the resume, just avoid it altogether and use the top of your resume for the really impactful stuff that's going to help us make a quick decision about your candidacy. Not a picture. Mistake number two came into being with the advent of programs like Canva. And this mistake is using fancy, pretty formatting to make a really visually stunning resume. However, the problem is that those resumes often don't get parsed correctly into our Applicant Tracking systems. And the reason for this is that they use multi column formats, they use different color backgrounds, sometimes they use block colored backgrounds. This just doesn't work really well with an applicant tracking system that is really meant to parse plain PDFs and plain word documents. So what we see is that people's names and all kinds of information gets parsed into the system in all kinds of wacky ways, which makes you unsearchable. And some applicant tracking systems actually cannot index those types of resumes. And so we get an error when we try to open the resume within the Applicant Tracking System. These are all things that provide extra friction to the application process, meaning that if we want to go look at your information, we have to download the resume, try and parse it out ourselves, and we're really busy. So I will tell you that unfortunately many recruiters will simply not look at those resumes. So do yourself a favor and don't use those fancy beautiful resumes, because you might not ever get seen by a pair of human eyes if you do. It may sound really boring, but a simple, single column ugly resume is your best bet for getting into the Applicant Tracking System successfully. The third mistake is related, but slightly different, which is to use fancy bullet points. Don't do it. Just don't use anything except regular bullet points or hashes. The reason is, again, the Applicant Tracking System cannot understand what these are. So we have seen all kinds of bullet points over the years. We've seen stars, we've seen happy faces, check marks. All of those things are really hard for the Applicant Tracking System to correctly parse in and could again result in your resume never being seen because it didn't parse properly into the system. So they may look cool when you're putting them in. And I know you can do these in Word, but my recommendation is not to do it. Don't take chances at this early stage of your application where you might not actually even be parsed into the system correctly that will ruin your chances for absolutely no reason. The fourth mistake is so painful it is when candidates neglect to proofread their resumes. Cannot tell you how many times I have been asked to let a candidate go because a hiring manager or a member of the interview team found a typo in the resume. It's really that simple. And here's why. Biotech is a very detail oriented industry. We are expected to be creating drugs that are going to be used in patients. Many hiring managers maintain that a candidate who cannot be bothered to proofread their resume might not be bothered to put things into their electronic notebook correctly, or to double check things, or to have basic attention to detail that is absolutely required in biotech. So there are a few tactics to help you with this. First of all, you can use something like Grammarly, which is a great tool that unfortunately doesn't always get it right within context because Grammarly doesn't understand science. But it can help you to find basic grammatical and spelling errors and it does it really efficiently. Another tactic is to give it to a friend and ask them to look at it, especially if you have a friend who happens to be very detail oriented. And a third tactic is to read things out loud before you send them in. This goes for all of your communications throughout the entire hiring process. Not just your resume, but if you're going to send an email or a note on LinkedIn or anything like that, read out loud. Often you'll catch things by reading out loud that you won't by reading silently because your brain actually reads much faster than you can say the words. And slowing it down that little bit gives you the time to observe those mistakes. So those are my three tips. Make sure you're using something like Grammarly, make sure that you're sending it to a friend and read out loud at all stages, at all communications. It is all critically important throughout the entire application process and into your interviews and through your offer letter. I don't want to scare you, but I have also seen a few times where a client has withdrawn an offer so very late stage because of an unprofessional email. So this needs to carry through every step of your process all the way through until you get hired and hopefully beyond that too, right? But this is critically, critically important. Mistake number five is a little bit funny and very avoidable. Sometimes we see people use an unprofessional email address and this goes right at the top of your resume it's one of the very first things we see. I have seen the craziest email addresses. I won't use a real example here, but in my column I gave a fake example that's very close to one that I recently saw, which was collegedoglover95ahoo.com that's cute and that's great for junk mail, but it's not acceptable on a resume. So you're going to want a professional email address. It can be your first name and last name. If those are taken, you can always put something that's professional on there, like scientist, or even the type of scientists like biochemist. Those are all appropriate and will also allow you to create a dedicated inbox for your job search. So consider making a free but professional email address just for your search and you can avoid the embarrassment of a hiring manager commenting on your silly email address later in the process. Mistake number six is again one we see often from international candidates, and it just comes down to customs of other countries and how you apply for jobs in other countries. In the United States, do not put any personal information on your resume. We do not want to know your marital status, your religion, your sexual orientation, your age, or anything like that. All we want to know is what you can bring to the job. Anything that is not related to your direct ability to perform the job should not be on your resume. Now, we do have a lot of protections in place so that we can't make hiring decisions based on those things. But again, you are introducing bias into the equation if you put those things onto your resume. Because again, humans are humans and we're going to make snap decisions. So don't do it. And know that it is also your right to not be asked those questions during interviews. So this goes both ways. Don't put it on your resume. And if you're asked a personal question, you do not need to answer it. We'll do another installment at some point about how to push back on a question that makes you uncomfortable or shouldn't legally be asked in an interview. But for now, just know that none of that should ever come into the hiring equation. Ever. Oh, and a side note, every once in a while someone will put their Social Security number on a resume. I don't know why. Don't do that. We don't need that. And that's actually really scary to get because we have to figure out how to dispose of it appropriately. Hey, I just want to cut in to say that if you are enjoying this podcast, you may enjoy the Building Biotechs podcast from our sister company, Recruitomics Consulting, which is a talent acquisition strategy firm that specializes in helping small biotechs hire exceptional talent. In that podcast, we interview amazing people who are building biotechs. They are industry leaders in all different verticals and it will allow you to explore career paths in biotech and to get to know companies that maybe you've never heard about. So if you are a biotech fan, you are exploring careers in biotech, I highly recommend the Building Biotechs podcast. We'll link that in the show notes or you can search for it on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right, back to our show. All right, this one might surprise you, but a big mistake is including an objective statement on your resume. Now this is my personal preference and I know a lot of recruiters and hiring managers that agree with this, so take this with a grain of salt, but there is a difference between an objective statement and a headline. An objective statement is more of a me, me, me statement. So I gave a really bad example in the column that I actually saw recently on a resume. It was a total nonsense objective statement. But listen to the language and we'll parse it out in a minute. This objective statement read, seeking a challenging position in biotechnology to utilize my skills. Okay, that's just a nonsense statement. It doesn't say anything. But also the my, putting the me, the my, the I. That is what makes things an objective statement. Objective statements often say what you want to be doing. It doesn't say what the company will gain from having you on the team. And everyone's a little self centered and that's okay. You need to be putting yourself in the shoes of the person reading the resume. They want to know what, what's in it for me? What can you do for me? So that is where a headline comes in. A headline is a much more tailored statement specifically for the job that says your value proposition and it uses the language of the job in that headline so that immediately the recruiter, the hiring manager, anyone on the interview team can imagine you in the role. So here's an example of a stronger headline statement. Innovative protein engineer with five plus years experience in solving challenging problems through antibody design. So we are now bringing some numbers into it. We're putting in a job title. This would be for a protein engineer or a protein scientist and we are telling the hiring team what you bring to the role that is your value proposition. And the subtle difference in language makes a huge impact on how we perceive the person as a team. Player or more self centered. So keep that in mind. Mistake number eight is to overuse keywords. I call this keyword stuffing. And it is where people just jam pack their resume with keywords that aren't actually very related to the job. So if you read the job description closely, and I have a great podcast episode on this, how to really closely read a job description so you can pull out the important bits. You want to be focusing on the keywords that are contained within that job description using the language of the job description. This is a technique we call mirroring. When you're in a conversation with somebody, humans naturally mirror each other and it's a really nice rapport building technique. So when you're chatting with somebody and they lean forward and you lean forward, or they lean back and you lean back, they smile, you smile. This is mirroring. It's hard to do in a resume, right? You're not seeing the person, but what you are seeing is the job description and the language that's in there. And so we mirror that in our resume by looking at the keywords there and using those exact keywords in our resume. But not just in a list. A list is out of context, and context is critically important for keywords because in the applicant tracking system, when we are searching for keywords, it highlights them in context so that we can see the full sentence or even a couple of sentences around that keyword. What we often see is that people will put giant lists of keywords on their resumes with no context, and then it's up to us to go sleuth around and figure out how did you actually use that keyword? That's not fair to the recruiter who's reviewing hundreds of resumes. So make it easy on us. Select your keywords carefully for the job. Use the exact keywords in that job description and put them into a bullet point. That is an action oriented bullet point that tells me exactly how you use that keyword and what your impact was. That's going to be so much stronger than just using a bunch of random keywords that could possibly be something somebody sometime is going to search for. We don't really use applicant tracking systems in that way anymore. So it really is important that as we're looking at this job, you are coming up for the right keywords and we're able to immediately understand your impact for those particular skills. All right, we're getting to the end of the list here. Number nine is a little bit related to number eight, but it's using buzzwords. So these are sometimes called like corporate jargon. These are words like detail oriented and team player. You can almost see the air quotes around those, right? Those words or phrases all by themselves mean very little to me. Again, I'm going to encourage you to show me within an action oriented bullet point how you actually apply those soft skills or those jargony terms. So if you're a team player, great. Tell me about it. Though the example I used in my column was for detail oriented. We see this all the time. People will just put the words detail oriented and expect me to believe them. Instead of that, how about something like implemented a new quality control process that reduced errors by 30%. See, I'm not actually looking for the keyword detail oriented. I'm looking for evidence. And so give me that evidence so that I can make my own judgment. Not only am I going to think you're detail oriented, I'm probably going to form a few other opinions about that. Like, you're probably quite analytical. So give me a good bullet point that actually demonstrates your value rather than just a list of steps. All right? And number 10, here's a mistake. I see probably with half of the resumes that I review, especially folks coming out of academia, don't send me your cv. Your CV is a long document that is specifically meant for academic applications. We want to see a resume. A resume is going to be a two or three page document. Don't worry about it being one page or two pages specifically, but we don't want more than about three pages because we're not going to look at it. I know you're sitting out there going, yeah, but what about my 50 publications? Where am I going to put those? Hyperlinks are your friend. I always encourage candidates to make a ResearchGate profile or to organize their PubMed profile and just hyperlink out to it. That way you can put your maybe three most relevant publications for this application and you can go through and you can choose what those are and you can put those three on your resume and say selected publications with a little hyperlink that says for a complete list of publications and you can even put in the number for a complete list of my 55 publications, visit my PubMed. And then that will serve as the repository for all of the great work that you have. The added bonus there is that the recruiter probably is not going to go visit that, but your hiring manager might. They're the scientist, right? When they travel over to that hyperlink, they're going to be able to fall down the rabbit hole of your publications, they're going to be able to look at other authors, labs, things like that that you can't possibly include in your resume. So it's actually a much better place to have those publications anyway. The other things that you want to really think about are how many bullet points that you have in each of your experiences. So if you've done a PhD, a postdoc, multiple industry roles, limit your bullet points to three or five action oriented bullet points per experience. Keep it consistent. If you choose three, do three for all. If you choose five, do five for all. Make it very consistent. Make it very organized. Again, you don't have to say that you're organized if your resume is beautifully organized. Just a little tip there and you can really think about how can I use economy of phrase? How can I make this as clear as possible? This is an exercise in clear writing. This is an exercise in marketing. You are communicating to a corporate audience with this document. So the types of things that you want to communicate are going to be slightly different than the academic audience. If you would like my template that my students use, send me an email helloolaboratorycareerhub.com and we will hook you up with our ugly resume template. It's not that ugly, but it is clean, it is plain. It has no formatting other than what applicant tracking systems will accept. It has been tested in all of the major applicant tracking systems and many of the minor applicant tracking systems. It works and it gets people interviews. So if you would like that, please reach out. And if you'd like to join my free biotech career development community where I can actually review this resume as you're working on it. You can also email us at helloollaboratorycareerhub.com and we'll make sure that you get the link into that community. It's a great place to be and it's also full of really supportive people who are going through all of this at the same time so you can feel like you have a great community around you. Okay, that was a lot. I'm going to zoom through it really quickly again. These are the 10 mistakes you do not want to make. They might cost you an interview. Do not use a profile picture on your resume. Do not use fancy formatting or those pretty resumes you can get on canva. Don't use fancy bullet points. Just stick to regular, plain, ugly bullet points and that will be so much better for getting you through the applicant tracking system and into a human's hands. Do not forget to proofread this is critical. Don't use an unprofessional email address. Create a nice email address just for your job search. Do not share personal information. We do not need to know anything that doesn't pertain to your direct ability to do the job. Don't use an objective statement. Swap it out for a very clear, value driven headline statement. Instead, don't give me a giant list of keywords. Give me keywords in context, in action oriented bullet points. And don't use those corporate jargony buzzwords again. Show me in a very nice bullet point exactly how you apply those skills in your work. And finally, don't send me a cv. Send me a tailored industry resume. It will make my life easier. It will get you through into interviews much more quickly and it's going to show people that you really have the industry mindset, which is a little bit more corporate. Yes, but also we get things done. It's a really satisfying feeling to see drugs moving into the clinic, moving into patients, and we get that done because we are very goal oriented. So that needs to be reflected on your resume as well. All right, that is all for now. I hope that was really valuable to you. Send me a note with your questions. Jump into our community. I can't wait to see you working on your resumes together. It is so fantastic to see the community come together and help out one another and then share the wins and the interviews you're getting. I'll see you in there. Have a great weekend and bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to the.

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