Samantha Lee/Business Insider
When Tina Nicolai began working as a recruiter for Walt Disney World in the late 1990s, she noticed that many job seekers were submitting flawed résumés.
"I realized people simply did not know how to market themselves or their achievements," Nicolai tells Business Insider. "And that's how I knew there was a market to educate job candidates at all levels and in all industries."
So in 2010, she founded Résumé Writers' Ink.
"Since launching my company, I've read over 40,000 résumés," she says. And there are a few mistakes she's seen over and over again that are "pretty irritating."
They are:
"The biggest mistake job seekers make: They are sloppy. They pay poor attention to detail. They are lazy!"
Nicolai says she has seen too many résumés with typos, unprofessional fonts, outdated information, and irrelevant information.
Summaries are annoying when they are written in a formal tone and include too many adjectives, she says.
"After a while, the summaries can read like a lengthy chapter in a book. It's better to list a few bullets with pointed achievements and a branded tag line stating, 'known for achieving XYZ.'"
This is another "lazy thing" she has seen too many times on résumés.
"Candidates need to understand that starting a sentence with 'responsible for' tells the reader what the job requirements were supposed to be, but it does not state that the candidate actually performed the functions," Nicolai says. "It does not state that the candidate was successful in these functions. Don't be lazy: Take the extra few minutes to explain what you accomplished — not what you were expected to accomplish."
