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As you draft and edit your resume, keep a close eye out for these five common mistakes. Any one of these oversights can hurt your chances, and all of them are easy to spot and correct.

Mistake #1: Sending a Scattered, Unfocused Message

If you’ve had a complex career history and you have more than one skill or talent to offer (which most of us do), you might feel obligated to pack every one of these skill sets into one vague, muddled message. The message: You’re terrific at everything! You’re a hard working go-getter! But watch out for this message, since it can actually do you more harm than good. Keep your profile focused on one specific skill set, and let everything else become ancillary and supportive. If your profile is concrete rather than abstract, readers will find it more interesting and easier to remember.

Mistake #2: Rounding, Stretching, Omitting and Misleading

These are all forms of dishonesty, even though they aren’t outright lies. Don’t round up your GPA, round out your dates of employment, or overstate the revenue you made for your company. These aren’t easy to confirm, but they do often plant the seeds of suspicion that can encourage readers to move on to the next resume in the stack.

Mistake #3: Missing an Opportunity

You’re an IT pro with six years of experience, and you also happen to speak fluent Spanish. You might think your language skills have nothing to do with your IT prospects…but think again. If you have a language skill, a software proficiency, any public speaking or performance experience, leadership training, or business ownership experience (even if your business closed down long ago), your employers should know about this.

Mistake #4: Clumsy Writing

Even if your resume is typo-free, it can still benefit from some serious content editing. Make sure your sentences are smooth, clear, elegant, and powerful.  A strong command of the language indicates intelligence and organized thought patterns.

Mistake #5: Skipping Keywords

Your resume may be dropped into a vast database the minute it’s received. In order to make it out of this resume purgatory, your document will need to contain the kinds of words and phrases that will be used by managers in keyword searches. Read the job post carefully in order to predict what these words and phrases might be, and make sure plenty of them appear in your document, even if you have to include a string of random words at the bottom of the page.

For more on how to give your resume every possible chance of success, make an appointment with the staffing and career development professionals at Expert.

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