Did You Miss That Typo? The Executive Reviewing Your Resume Didn't...

Did You Miss That Typo? The Executive Reviewing Your Resume Didn't...
How long have you been staring at your executive resume?
Making tweaks to a word here, a switch of bullet points
there, taking out the periods between M and B and A and
putting them back in again...

And all the while, there's a glaring typo sitting in the
middle of your Executive Summary, and you can't even see it.

Why?

Because you've been staring at your resume for hours ...
days ... weeks ... and your eyes keep blowing by the typo
because you're not even really reading your resume anymore.

Well, I hate to say this, but people are doing this all the
time with their resumes. Executives, professionals, you
name it. And what's worse, they often don't even know it.

Will one or two typos sink your resume? Maybe, maybe not.
But let's put it this way - as HR staffers, recruiters, and
other job search professionals receive ever greater amounts
of resumes for a given position, they look to eliminate as
many resumes from contention as possible BEFORE they start
to consider who to call for a preliminary interview.

So why take that chance, if you can dust off a proofreading
trick or two instead, and raise your odds of making the
short list of candidates who receive something more like
serious consideration?

First things first: Print your resume out. Trust me, you
need to get away from your computer screen if you want to
catch those last typos that could make or break your shot
at an interview. (Yes, even a little thing like a typo
could be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back.)

Now, here's the trick to proofreading: Read your resume out
loud and backwards. And by backwards, I mean that literally.

Let's assume you have a bullet in your resume which reads,
"Cut spending by 35% to meat department reduction goal,
while increasing revenue by 62%."

To proofread it, say this out loud: "Percent sixty-two by
revenue increasing while goal reduction department meat to
35% by spending cut."

Why? Spell-checkers won't catch typos like "meat" versus
"meet," for example. (When did you catch the typo - in the
first sentence, or in the backwards version?)

And because your brain actively seeks to put information
within a context, and because reading backwards is such a
foreign concept to your brain, you'll try to focus on one
word at a time, and your brain will force your eyes to
bounce back and forth to the words before and after, to try
to establish context.

As a result, you get a better chance to correct the errors
that could sink your most well-written resume - without you
even realizing it.

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Allen Voivod is the Chief Blogger for ResumeMachine.com,
the leading resume distribution resource for managers,
executives, and professionals looking to accelerate their
job search results. Get the attention of thousands of
hiring agents with the largest and most frequently updated
recruiter database on the web, and dive into a wealth of
immediately useful career articles and blog posts - all at
http://www.ResumeMachine.com !