Twelve Points to Leave Off Your Resume

The first hurdle in any job hunt is building your resume. Ultimately, your first draft is a template for something that you are going to tailor based on each opportunity (if you’re serious about the job). Pulling it together is a painful process of learning how to see yourself from the outside. Writing for Glassdoor.com, John Sumser, founder and editor-in-chief of HRExaminer, offers a few guidelines for items you should definitely not include in your resume.

Click through for 12 things you should avoid adding to resume, as identified on Glassdoor.com by John Sumser, founder and editor-in-chief of HRExaminer.

The hardest part of a job search is staying motivated. With little feedback and long stretches of waiting, it’s more like baseball than basketball. Staying pumped is critical. Using your resume as a place to explain that you are will just look stupid.

A resume is a great place for telling stories about the way that you convert lemons into lemonade. But, you have to be careful with personal disclosures. Some triumphs are best left off until you really know who’s reading it. Also included would be success stories like ‘reduced cigarette consumption by 62 percent’.

Conventional wisdom suggests keeping your resume somewhat impersonal. On the other hand, some companies really want to know about your external cultural life. A well-rounded applicant may want to demonstrate a bit of literacy in video or other art forms. This is a tricky maneuver and should avoid controversial topics.

Many of us use psychotherapists to navigate some of life’s rough patches. Anyone who has survived a long stretch of unemployment or a layoff needed help, whether they got it or not. Still, the image of you working your way through a Kleenex box while on the couch is not a great picture to paint for the person you want as your new boss. As for parental involvement in your job hunt — only if you like sleeping on their couch for another extended period.

Some of the greatest leaders of our time have had, um, experimental patches during their 20s. George W. Bush ran it well into his 30s. You can rest assured that Bill Clinton’s ‘once’ was ‘once over a period of many, many years’. That said, your prior life as an enterprising capitalist probably won’t sit all that well with the team who is going to interview you.

Okay, okay. It really does require extreme coordination and profound judgment 10 beers into a pong tournament. And, anyone who’s been there knows it is clear evidence of one’s ability to perform under stress. But, your resume goes to a wide audience. Some of them may not be familiar with the nuances.

Surprisingly, conquering addiction doesn’t tell everyone that you have a strong character. There are loads of people who (with some statistical evidence) think, once a drunk, always a drunk. While sobriety is an amazing gift, your resume will never emerge from the black hole if you mention your 12-step program.

Now that our wars are being fought from video consoles in windowless warehouses in crummy industrial parks, everyone wants to show their video skills. If you must put something on your resume, go for the more complicated and serious stuff like multi-user universes or complex battle simulations. Mastering Angry Birds just serves to underline that gap between your second and third jobs.

You’ve read the crazy truth that headhunters earn as much as 33 percent of the first year’s salary. So, you decide to make the offer yourself. While this approach does work in a range of labor markets controlled by gangs, resumes don’t usually account for much there. More likely, you’ll offend someone even if you are really sincere.

It happens. Your performance begins to falter after a big success or a big failure. You know it’s over. They know it’s over. You start to move on. Stay away from phrases like “I knew it was all downhill when…”

What actually happens in the office is really different from what’s in the job description. No job ad ever said “extensive brown-nosing experience is a must.” No department ever actually hired someone to make all that money from running the coffee pot and getting supplies. Other useful skills that you should keep out of the document include: getting the boss home when he’s incapacitated; ‘borrowing’ office supplies from other departments; fudging expense reports to get things done; beating the internal procurement system; and pushing expenses into someone else’s budget.

Continuous learning is the hallmark of a great knowledge worker. Using a resume to tell the story of your adaptability and willingness to navigate uncharted territories is powerful. Keep the message to material that is clearly related to professional development.