Your resume doesn’t have to include everything about you.
Most of us know what we should put on our resumes, recent jobs, important awards, academic degrees related to the job and of course a clear and easy way for your potential employers to contact you. But how much do you know about what you should leave off your resume?
Photograph
There are certain jobs where what you look like are a crucial factor, such as an actor or a model. However in every other situation, a photograph included in the resume is a fatal flaw.
Employers have to be careful not to open themselves up to accusations of illegal discrimination. A photo view the employer an idea of your age, ethnic background and allows them to see if you’re overweight, attractive or suffering from an obvious disability. To avoid the perception that they rejected or hired you based on these attributes, many employers will simply throw away a resume with an attached photo.
Physical Attributes
This basically falls under the same category as a photograph. Your potential employer doesn’t need to know your hair colour, height, weight or ethnicity. They don’t need to know about your disabilities. They don’t want to know because they are legally prevented from discriminating against people.
Marital Status or Number of Children
When an employer sees a candidate with kids, they see an employee who’s going to take days off to take care of them, who’s going to leave early to pick them up from school and who’s going to need an expensive health insurance plan.
Employers might also dislike candidates who don’t have kids, or see a young married woman as someone who will undoubtedly be taking maternity leave within a year or so.
While it is illegal to discriminate based on a candidate’s family situation, it’s best not to give them the chance to.
Hobbies
Leave your hobbies off your resume because the space there needs to be used in the best possible way to show you are the best candidate for the job.
There are exceptions to every rule, of course. Maybe your hobby of researching and cataloguing historical documents is relevant when applying for a job as a curator at a history museum. But most of the time, employers don’t need or want to know about your hobbies.
Political or Religious Affiliation
There are two reasons to leave this off your resume. First, like we have said, employers have to be careful about discrimination. The other reason, why take a chance that your potential new boss will dislike you when you don’t have to? It is difficult to prove to that your resume was tossed out based on your views on various political situations and not because you were unqualified for the job.
Detailed Explanations of Employment Gaps
The problem here is that there is that there’s rarely a good explanation for lengthy employment gaps. If there is, it is rarely relevant to the job at hand. The best way to avoid this problem is to use a functional resume rather than a chronological resume.
Employers may still notice gaps and ask you about them at the interview, so have good answers ready. However it is still much more natural to explain time taken off work in person than to use a bullet point on a resume.
Objectives
The problem with objectives they accomplish nothing while taking the most valuable chunk of real estate on your resume. They don’t tell the employer anything about the candidate and don’t differentiate the candidates from each other.
It its place use a header that highlights who you are and why you are great. That will get some attention.
Jobs You Had More Than 10 Years Ago
The skills you had at a job more than 10 years ago are going to seem dated and not useful to an employer today. Depending on the job those skills might still be useful, even so an employer is not likely to be interested in a job you had that long ago. It can seem like you’re padding you resume because you didn’t have enough good experience in recent years.
Refences
The traditional list of references is another casualty of changing resume standards. While you do need an up to date list of references, keep them on a separate sheet. When your potential employer wants to check your references, they will let you know.
