Struggling to find space on your resume to fit some key details and accomplishments? It might be time for a resume cleanup.
There may be a lot of items on your resume that were relevant six years ago, but are no longer relevant for what jobs you’re applying for in 2015 that can simply be removed. There are also items that need to be refreshed in order to make you look more professional.
Here are a few things you need to clean up or take off your resume immediately:
Irrelevant or Outdated Jobs
That part-time job you had at the Gap? It needs to go. Unless you’re fresh out of university and have no real experience to put on your resume, there’s no need to include jobs that are outdated or irrelevant to the position you’re applying to.
Don’t try to stretch out these irrelevant jobs, either—hiring managers can see right through that. For example, if you’re applying for a marketing job, there’s no need to try to re-word your previous (irrelevant) experience in order to try and make it work for the position you’re applying to—you’ll only hurt your chances of getting an interview.
If you think your resume feels bare after removing these outdated positions, you can add in any volunteer experience you have that’s relevant to the position you’re applying for. Even though a volunteer position is unpaid and doesn’t have the same demands as a job would entail, it’s still experience, and that’s what a hiring manager is looking for above all else.
Unimportant University Details
Unless you’re a recent grad and want to specifically highlight your campus involvement, there’s no need to go overboard on your university experience. Most employers want to know the basics: school name, program name, and program length (e.g. 2006-2010).
Unless you’re fresh out of university and have no real experience to put on your resume, there’s no need to include jobs that are outdated or irrelevant to the position you’re applying to.
You might want to include your GPA, but this, again, depends on the company you’re applying to. If you’re applying for an extremely niche position where there are going to be a lot of applicants, you can include your GPA to help stand out from the crowd—but for most positions, especially in creative fields, your GPA isn’t needed.
There are a few other things that you might want to keep on (or remove) depending on the position you’re applying to. If you were the valedictorian, this would definitely be important to note. If you were the member of a club, leave this off your resume—but if you were the founder of a club, this could be useful to note.
Just make sure the key three details are included—everything else is secondary, and requires a judgment call in regards to their inclusion or omission. When it comes down to it, you can always mention these secondary details when you’re face-to-face with the hiring manager during the interview.
Remove high school details altogether. High school details take up space and are entirely unimportant for almost any job you apply to (unless you’re in high school).
Your Address
Including your address on your resume might seem harmless, but it actually hurts your chances of landing an interview. If you’re applying for a job in the city but live 40 minutes away in the suburbs, some hiring managers might be concerned about your commute (or other issues stemming from the perceived “distance”) and might pass you over for an interview in favour of someone else more local.
There really isn’t any reason for a hiring manager to need to know about your home address prior to an interview (or even after an interview). All you need on your resume, in regards to you contact details, is your full name, phone number (cell phone, not home phone), and email address. If you have a website or a well-kept LinkedIn profile, you can provide the links for these on your resume, but this is up to your own discretion and depends on the position you’re applying for/the company you’re applying to.
“Objective”
The top of your resume is prime real estate—why waste that space on a generic, uninformative “objective”? Outlining what you’re searching for, or what you hope to get out of working in a specific position or company, doesn’t tell the hiring manager anything about why you’d make a valuable contribution to the company. All an objective does is put the focus on what you want, but you need to tell the hiring manager what you bring.
Replace the “objective” with a profile or professional summary that highlights your skills and expertise, in no more than two sentences, and tells the hiring manager how valuable you’d be to the company, and why you’re right for the position.