I was browsing through a few dozen resumes today, and I noticed some common mistakes. I thought I’d share with you some professional resume tips to help you to learn from their mistakes.

Below are the professional resume tips you should take away from each mistake:

1. Use the body of your email to sell yourself

Actual Example: Someone emailed me their resume saying: “I’m a current graduate student at [school]. I would like to apply for the [open position]. The attachment is my one-page resume. I hope to have further contact with you in the future. Thanks.”

Analysis: Is this a human or a robot? The body of the email is both uninformative and abrupt. For all I know, they used that exact text to apply for a job at McDonald’s. I get no sense of who the applicant is. Ask yourself: what will make me want to open your resume if I have dozens of others to go through?

The Fix: Treat your email body like a cover letter.

In the body of your email, give me something that makes me want to learn more about you.

Treat your email like a cover letter by introducing yourself in a moving way. Make me think: ah… this is a real, likable person. I want to learn more about what they can do for me.

Be concise and make sure you:

1. Demonstrate that you get things done by identifying a few concrete tasks you completed or quantifiable change you brought to related projects.
2. Demonstrate your passion by describing how this position relates to what excites you in life.

2. Send your resume as a PDF

PDF files can be viewed on all computers, regardless of operating system or software version. It would be silly to send me a .docx if there’s any chance I can’t open it.

Never send your resume as a .docx file. Hiring managers will not take the time to convert your resume to a .doc so they can read it. (Many don’t even know how). When you have lots of applicants, it just doesn’t make sense to waste time converting dozens of resumes.

Always. Send. A. PDF. Otherwise, it may never get opened.

3. Name your resume like this:  “[First] [Last] Resume.pdf”

Imagine you’re a hiring manager for a moment. You have a folder full of resumes on your hard drive. You have too many applicants to remember their names. Wouldn’t you want your resumes to have consistent file names – one single naming system so you can quickly see exactly whose resume is whose, alphabetically?

It’s always a breath of fresh air when I don’t have to manually change the filename of your resume. And every breath of fresh air I get when dealing with your resume, the more I like you. It’s probably unfair, but when dealing with dozens of applicants, that’s just not something I want to have to deal with.

The bottom line is that every time you make my life easier, you score points in my book. So name your resume: First Last Resume.pdf.

4. Use bold text to emphasize your most important points

Hiring managers don’t have much time to make decisions. That’s why in your email body, you should put your most important points in bold. The items that will win you the job should jump off the screen.

One applicant today took the time to bold each company name and position he held in the body of his email. This made it easier for me to scan his text, filter out the noise and hone in on his credentials. Before I began reading through his email, I could already see where he’d worked. And after I finished, the bold text still stood out, reminding me again of his credentials. He successfully emphasized his most important points to me.

How can you use bold to strengthen the text of your email?

5. Include concrete actions and quantifiable results. Vagueness is a deal-breaker!

The more vague you are about what you’ve done, the less I care.

This is weak: “Worked on Project X,” or “Led Project Y.”

How do I know what you did on Project X? Or what results you achieved? What does it mean to lead Project Y? What did you actually do?

This is strong: “Identified and reported 27 bugs per day testing Software X,” or “Developed complete end-user requirements for Project Y based on 15 two-hour customer interviews.”

This tells me you actually did something. Concreteness is your best friend. If your bullet points make me clearly imagine you doing a specific task, then I can picture you working at my company.

Vagueness is your enemy. If you use broad verbs that don’t describe specific actions, then I can’t picture you working at my company. I don’t care if you “oversaw” or “worked on” something. That means diddly to me. What did you actually do?

This is weak: “Responsible for new client acquisition.”

“Responsible for” is too vague. So is “oversaw.”

You were responsible for new client acquisition, but did you actually do it? That doesn’t tell me what you really did. Nor does it quantify the results you achieved.

This is strong: “Cold-called 50 potential clients a week, converting 10% into paying customers.”

That’s much better. It tells me exactly what you did. I can picture you on the phone, chatting it up with prospective customers, winning over new clients and increasing my company’s bottom line.

6. Include two or three quotes from good references.

Everybody says “references available upon request.”

To stand out, actively insert two or three “testimonials” from people you’ve worked with. It can be a past bosses, co-workers, project teammates or even professors. Keep each quote under three sentences. Make sure they concretely support your greatest strengths.

This is weak: “John was a great teammate to work with on our Project X.”

This says nothing about what John is good at. Vague verbs like “great” or “excellent” don’t tell me anything about John. What is John specifically great at? Sometimes a brief story is the most effective way to illustrate your strengths.

This is strong: “We hired John after our last programmer left us four weeks behind schedule. John’s ability to consistently meet coding deadlines under high pressure helped put us back on schedule. He was a hard-working and invaluable member of our team.” Or, “John’s ability to connect emotionally with our customers made him our second most highly-rated customer service rep. He always left our users with a smile.”

7. Be a human, not a robot.

Take a moment in your email/cover letter to say something I can relate to. “I am really interested in working with you because we share a love of great design.” Okay, so you are in fact human and you acknowledge that I am a person with similar interests. Maybe we would even get along!

Don’t be afraid to include you interests on your resume as well. They show that you lead an interesting life and are not as boring as your bullet points might make you sound.

8. Give your resume to two other people to proofread.

You are going to miss a typo. It doesn’t matter if you have super-human editing skills. Do yourself a favor: have two other people read over your resume and cover letter before you send them in. Inevitably, those people WILL find a typo that you missed. I guarantee it. A fresh pair of eyes can only end up helping, not hurting you.

9. Always provide your phone number.

If you actually care about getting the position you’re applying for, you’ll make it as easy as possible for me to contact you. If all you give is your email address, it appears that you don’t care enough about the position to be contacted in person. Always, always provide your phone number.

Start incorporating these nine professional resume tips into your resume right now. What can you improve?

1. Use the body of your email to sell yourself.
2. Send your resume as a PDF.
3. Name your resume like this:  “[First] [Last] Resume.pdf”
4. Use bold text to emphasize your most important points.
5. Include concrete actions and quantifiable results. Vagueness is a deal-breaker!
6. Include two or three quotes from good references.
7. Be a human, not a robot.
8. Give your resume to two other people to proofread.
9. Always provide your phone number.

Create a Remarkable Web Presence at Brand-Yourself.com

Once you’ve got your resume up to snuff, it’s time to create a visible web presence around it. Did you know that more than half of employers are more likely to hire you if you’ve spent time developing your personal brand across social networks? To help you do this, we built a platform to manage your online reputation from one central hub. Create your Brand-Yourself account today and see how our tools can help you build, optimize and promote a remarkable web presence that gets you hired.

Your personal brand is how other people feel about you. Their senses are the touchpoints of your brand.

To the external world, perception is reality.

Millennium of evolution have taught us to survive by making quick, split-second life or death decisions. Our brains are wired to rapidly recognize patterns, then use that information to inform our next actions.

That’s one reason we tend to stereotype groups of people. When we see a distinct group of people doing one similar thing, we identify a pattern. The next time we meet someone new that belongs to that same group (whether they’re the same race, religion, class, age, industry, etc.), our brain lumps them into the previously recognized pattern, and predicts that they will act in the same way. Of course this is plain wrong, but the process is unconscious.

People will have pre-conceived notions about you as soon as they lay eyes on you. Although you can’t stop it from happening, you can use it to your advantage. Here’s how.

Clothes

How would a stranger feel about you if they saw you on the street?

Would you seem:

• Professional, clean, organized and wrinkle-free?
• Creative, unorthodox, free thinking and experimental?

Think about whether or not your physical appearance is in harmony with your brand. If it isn’t, what’s one thing you can do today to help create the vibe you want? (Shoes, suits, scarves, accessories, etc.). Live your brand by dressing the part to be taken more seriously.

Apartment, House, or Office

How would a stranger feel about you if they saw your apartment, house or office for the first time?

Think about ways to bring your living spaces into alignment with your brand:

• Motivational posters
• Tapestries
• Welcome mat
• Name plaque
• Business card stack

Website

If you don’t have a website, how do you expect to showcase your skills a wide audience whose eyeballs are glued to their computer screens?

Check out these three posts to take advantage of the sense of sight on the web:

1. Six Simple Secrets to a Well-Designed Site
2. 4 Tips to Clean Your Social Networking Profiles and Impress Employers
3. Tips to Rank Highly on Google and Increase Your Visibility Online

Business Materials

Are the colors, shapes and language on your career toolkit consistent with your brand? Think about how can your toolkit, including your:

1. Resume
2. Cover letter
3. Business card
4. Email signature

Sight informs first impressions

People make snap judgments about your appearance. Although this is unavoidable, you can be prepared. If you dress sloppily, people will notice it and make a mental note of it. On the other hand, if you dress the part, you will be taken more seriously and people will be more likely to listen to what you have to say.

Mastering the elements that define your brand gives you more say in how people perceive you. Just like on the web, people form impressions of you based on the breadcrumbs that they find. The more breadcrumbs they find that support your brand, the stronger they feel they understand you. What can you do today to align the sense of sight with your brand?

Author: Trace Cohen

How to brand yourself

Before we can figure out how to brand yourself, let’s first establish what personal branding is.

We use this definition:

“The process of uncovering and marketing your core competencies to meet an audience’s needs, resulting in your financial freedom and fulfillment.”

Understanding how to brand yourself in order to work a job you love involves these vital steps:

• Uncover/Develop your personal brand
• Establish credibility
• Establish niche involvement
• Establish visibility
• Create your career toolkit

Uncover and develop your personal brand

Uncovering your personal brand is your first step. Your brand is how people think and feel about you. Uncovering your brand through self-discovery and soul-searching must happen before anything else. Only after “discovery” does developing a personal brand make sense.

Developing your personal brand does not mean that you are creating some fictitious image. Actually, it is the opposite. It means figuring out who you really are, where you want to go, and how you can help others.

Ask yourself:

• How do people describe you?
• How do you describe yourself?
• What makes you different from your peers?

To determine how to brand yourself, you need to identify:

1. Who is your audience?
2. What do you do better than everyone else?
3. Why do you do what you do? What provides the motivation?
4. How do you stand out from your peers?

Develop your personal branding statement

One of the best ways to determine your personal brand is to craft a personal branding statement. The personal branding statement enables you to draw out your personal brand on paper. You will be left with a concise way of articulating your unique value proposition to others in one or two sentences. This personal branding statement will come in handy when you are assembling your career tool kit. To get down and dirty in discover the foundation of your personal brand, check out our popular post: Everything you need to start building your personal brand right now.

How you answered the questions above determines how you should approach making your personal brand by being more credible, visible and involved.

Establishing Your Brand: Get Visible, Credible and Involved

Visibility, Credibility and Niche Involvement are vital when you’re ready to market your developed personal brand. Without any one of these, your brand will not be as strong.

Establish credibility

Now that you have gone through the initial process of developing your personal brand we can tackle the question “how to brand yourself.” Moving forward we will first focus on making sure that your brand is credible. We put this as the step first because we feel that without a credible brand that everyone will believe, it is not important how visible or involved you are.

So, how do you go about becoming more credible? There are three things you can do online to make yourself more credible and to help brand yourself.

• Publish Articles
  • Publishing articles builds your credibility by spotlighting you as a reliable individual in your area of expertise.
• Maintain a Blog
  • Starting your own blog demonstrates your willingness to contribute back to your niche with your own expertise. Most importantly it shows that you care about a certain topic and are willing to spend time writing about it.
• Contribute to other blogs
  • Many bloggers out there are regularly looking for guest blog posts. Start to know who operates in the blogosphere related to your expertise and reach out to these bloggers.

Establish niche involvement

Being involved in your niche is the next step in figuring out how to brand yourself. After you have proven that you are credible you need to get more involved. You will probably be surprised at how large your niche is and you will soon realize who the major players are.

There are three key things you can do to get involved:

1. Comment on Blogs. Start off by commenting on other blogs out there. It is not useful to post simple comments such as “That was a great post.” Instead, spend a few minutes and put down a useful response that shows your brand in a positive light as well as potentially starting a conversation between yourself and the blogger. Provide insight or an interesting and related fact.
2. Comment on Forums. There are thousands of forums on the web, many relate to your area of expertise. Start by reading forums and contributing feedback to threads. This shows that you are willing to participate in conversations and that you are able to help other people with their questions.  Demonstrate that you are involved and intelligent enough to participate in current dialogs, as well as answer people’s questions.
3. Answer questions on LinkedIn and other Q&A communities. Reach out to others in your niche by tapping into your own experience and expertise and responding to questions in places like LinkedIn Answers or Yahoo! Answers.

Establish visibility

This is one of the more fun stages in your search to answering the question “How to brand yourself?” In the age of the web, a strong brand means little  if nobody can find you. This step in your search to develop your personal brand is where you display for the rest of the world who you are, what you’ve done, and where you exist online.

• Create a profile on social networks such as LinkedIn,  Facebook and Twitter.
• Create a profile on directories such as Naymz, Plaxo and ZoomInfo.
• Vote for your site in social bookmarks like Delicious to improve your position in Google results.

A common pitfall that we see all the time is when someone rushes into a social network and friends everyone they can find, even people they don’t know. Then they never log in again. This is not a good practice. We suggest that you start slowly and carefully. Pick one top-tier place at a time, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Establish your presence there before bringing another one on board. Just creating a presence is not enough. You have to go through the process of filling in your entire profile – including your bio and a professional headshot. There is nothing worse than coming to someone’s profile that is not cohesively put together or completed.

It is also important that your brand is consistent meaning that you use a common headshot through all networks, and your brand on each of these systems conveys a similar message. It is also important that you can be easily found through search engines.

Create your career toolkit

A career toolkit is a vital step to develop your personal brand. Before you apply for a job, you need to make sure that you have the following items are cohesively put together. I am not going in depth here, but I’ve provided a link to some of our other posts related to each item in your career toolkit:

• Your resume
  • A brief overview of the 5 types of Resumes
  • The key components of a resume
• Your cover letter
  • Writing the perfect cover letter
• Your web presence
  • Tips to Clean Your Social Networking Profiles and Impress Employers
  • Tips to Rank Highly on Google and Increase Your Visibility Online
• Your references
  • Top 5 Articles About Getting Stellar References for Your Job Search
• Your interview skills/preparedness
  • Interviews 101
  • How to Ace Any Type of Interview

If you are not familiar with all aspects of the hiring process you should probably spend a few minutes going over our outline of the job hiring process.

How to Brand Yourself: It’s A Continual Cycle

The above steps will greatly help you figure out how to brand yourself. You will find that as you work to develop your personal brand the process never ends.

You cannot just “create” a personal brand overnight. It is important that you first uncover it, articulate it, and then strengthen it by spending time on each step.

Developing your personal brand means laying the groundwork today for a happier and more successful life later. You have to be genuine to figure out what you want to do, whom you are doing it for, and then market your core competencies in a way that moves others.

Next: Everything You Need to Start Building Your Personal Brand Right Now >

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Brand-Yourself.com is a platform to diagnose, manage and monitor your online reputation for career success. Did you know that 83% of employers use the web to research job applicants? If you’re ready to proactively control your Google results and get hired, rather than cut from the applicant pool, try us for free and start controlling how you’re perceived online. Go ahead. Take our tools for a spin.

Q: What gets thousands of people fired every year and prevents people from getting jobs they want?

A: Inappropriate content online.

To make sure your web presence is helping, not hurting you, check out James DeVile’s recent article at TechRadar: Make an Online Profile to Get You Hired not Fired (how to promote your skills and hide your ills).

Here’s a great quote from the article that made us nod our heads: “The ultimate goal is to reach a stage where so much quantifiably positive information exists online that the paper CV becomes redundant.”

Right on, James. The future of hiring undeniably exists on the web. Check out the 5-part article for tips to effectively use social networks to control your personal brand online.

Author: Trace Cohen