We invited 15 of the top career and job-search experts — our Quintessential Careers Career Masterminds — to share their advice with our readers as part of Quint Careers’s 15th anniversary. We asked them (among six other questions): What are the most common strategic mistakes you see on job-seeker resumes? (See all their responses here.) We’re running a series of responses; here’s one of them:
The most common mistake is that the job-hunter talks about all that they want from a job, instead of trying to think
through all that an employer wants for that job. Employers as a group tend to assume microcosm = macrocosm; that is to say, the way someone
behaves in a small universe (the resume, or interview) reveals how they would behave in a larger universe (the day-by-day job, on offer).
Self-absorption on the part of a job-hunter — in his or her resume — is a killer.
— Richard Nelson Bolles
