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Author: Public Health Hiring Help Editor's Note: This article was originally printed in Public Health Hiring Help on October 1, 2025. To read more content from this source subscribe to Public Health Hiring Help: https://tinyurl.com/56cn6uc5 A friend from my master’s—we’ll call her Kathy—is now on the other side of the job hunt. Instead of sending off application after application, she sees countless résumés. Some are spectacular, others not so much, she notices, but often this has NOTHING to do with their content. In the résumés she has reviewed, she has witnessed the same mistakes over and over and over again. “I ask myself—why are applicants doing this? Maybe they just don’t know what to look for…” Kathy said to me once. Your résumé is your first impression to recruiters, hiring managers, and companies. Avoiding easy mistakes isn’t just professionalism, it’s a necessity. Thus, we sat down together to pinpoint eight common mistakes applicants make in their résumés so you don’t have to. Some may seem common sense, some not so much, but all of them should be on your checklist the next time you review your résumé. 1. grammar, Grammar, GRAMMAR! As common sense as this seems, these kind of mistakes easily drop under the radar. The wrong ‘there/their/they’re’, a comma splice, mismatching fonts, mis-capitalization of titles, missing date ranges. All of them can and do happen. It’s particularly a shame to have these errors now more than ever—especially when ChatGPT or another software can catch these easily. So, do yourself a favor, comb through line by line, have an outside reader, run it through a software to review (never to write!), whatever you need to catch these errors because, yes, they will be noticed. What specifically to review?
2. Order Matters Your résumé is used, first and foremost, to ensure that you meet the bare minimum requirements for the position. Do you have the degree you need—yes or no? Do you have XYZ skill—yes or no? How many years of work experience? If the bulk of time an employer takes looking at your résumé is just trying to decipher if you meet the requirements, you’re fighting a losing battle. The key is following a logical progression. The prevailing advice from most career counselors is to follow the intuitive order of events: start with Education, then move to Experience, then to Skills and Certifications, and lastly to Publications and Conferences. It also needs to be concise. No need to spread your research, employment, and volunteering across separate sections when they can all fall under a single “Experience” bucket. When employers have dozens of other applications to review, keeping it simple works in your favor. Finally, each section should address chronology the same. Standard advice is that the most recent item should come first. So most recent degree first in the Education section, and so on. 3. OW! My Eyes!!! If you remember one section from this article when you work on your résumé, let it be this one. Reading your résumé shouldn’t be a chore. Like I said before, if it is a hassle to extract basic information about your qualifications from your résumé, you’re in deep water. The bottom line? Don’t let it get congested and/or hard to read in any way. Most employers—Kathy included—would rather you go onto a second page than use size 10 single-spaced font to make it all fit on one page. And don’t even think about shrinking your margins to make it all fit—it’s visually overwhelming! But don’t swing too far the other direction either. Double-spacing or including spaces within bullet points can also disorient or distract your reader, as can other formatting choices like paragraph justify. It’s all about balance. And, sometimes, this can require compromise. For instance, you may need to leave hanging lines at the bottom of one page to keep a section describing one of your experiences together on the next page. Your résumé gives basic information, as well as high-level details—make sure headline items, like Job Title, Organization, and Dates stand out from the description, whether it be with bolding, italicizing, or another formatting choice. This formatting choice should be consistently employed throughout the entire résumé—be consistent with your headers, subheaders, etc. Similar advice goes for Skills sections—if I just want to know if you have PowerBI on your CV, I don’t want to spend time combing through long lines of text to find it! 4. No Silver Bullets One of the biggest complaints Kathy shared with me is that applicants often have vaguely written bullet points describing their experience. It tells her nothing. An employer needs to be able to figure out what you did and why it matters without having been there with you. Tell them deliverables or solutions. Tell them metrics or quantitative results. Tell them what methodologies or skills you leveraged. Use action words and vivid language. You want to tell the story with as few words as possible. For example, instead of “Created code repository for data analysis”, you could say “Created code repository of 15 R scripts utilizing packages like epitools, tinyverse, and ggplot to transform data and perform nonparametric statistical tests”. Yes, it’s longer (and she is a bit rough having come from the top of my noggin), but it only adds one extra line of text to tell you SO MUCH MORE! 5. Résumé Real Estate This one has been harped on before in PHHH, but we’re reviewing it again and driving it home. You have limited space on a résumé—most guidance (including USAJOBS) says two pages max. If you need to cut something to make the page limit and maintain clean formatting, please let it be any statement of purpose. I’m talking Career Summary, Career Goal, Qualifications Summary, Statement of Interest. It should be the first to go. Why? Your résumé is literally a career and qualifications summary! Any additional statement is taking valuable real estate. Similarly, any ‘Why’ or ‘Objective’ already has another home—your cover letter. While we’ve heard differing guidance on the cover letter debate in PHHH, if it is so important to you for a hiring manager to know why you’re interested, what your goals are, etc., go ahead and submit the cover letter and include this information there. 6. We Don’t Need the Kitchen Sink Not all experience is relevant experience, especially in the context of specific positions. Some skills are transferable, some aren’t, and some need a clear explanation of how they can be leveraged. Be mindful of each. Again, you have limited space. For example, being part of a cappella college is probably not relevant to your public health job applications. But maybe you were treasurer and know how to handle a budget—that could make it relevant. Or maybe your performances make you comfortable with public speaking/public engagements—that could be helpful. But just being in a cappella, no leadership and no pertinent knowledge, skills, or abilities? Everything on your résumé should have an explicit purpose. If you’re including it to fill space or if it is unclear why it might make you a strong fit for a role, it may be time to cut it loose from your application. House it in a master résumé and pull elements as needed if you truly can’t bear to part with it, but, as I always say, be discerning. 7. TMI It’s natural to want to include all of the information you think an employer will need on your résumé, but, sometimes, it really is too much. For instance, you don’t need to put your home address on your résumé. Heck, some say you don’t need to include your city on it either. After all, both go elsewhere on the application. Still, of course, keep contact information, but, again, it’s all about keeping it simple and to the point. 8. No Bells and Whistles Needed Finally, a common misconception is that making nonconventional choices with a résumé will help candidates. We’re talking using color, using different formats, using cardstock for distributing résumés at in-person events, etc. At the end of the day, these aren’t going to make you a better candidate for a job. Sure, they might make you stand out temporarily, but these choices, if not seen as distractions, don’t mask your experiences, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Focus your efforts on the substance of the résumé, not its appearance. ■
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