Transcript
Description:
If you're applying for a job, whether through an online application or in person, your resume is likely to be one of the first steps taken by a potential employer in determining if they should bring you into an interview. So, writing and sending out a clean, well-crafted resume is an essential first step to getting hired.
One of the most troublesome parts of the process is making sure your resume doesn't contain any typos or mistakes. Even if you spent a lot of time crafting your resume to bring attention to key strengths and experiences that might catch a hiring manager's eye, there's no guarantee it will be read that way if you make a simple error. So how can you ensure your resume is free of typos and grammatical mistakes? In this video, Harrison Barnes recommends the following:
- Ensure there are no grammatical errors on your resume.
- Proofread your resume and make sure that all punctuation errors are corrected.
- Always use software (like Grammarly) to check your resume for different kinds of errors.
Transcript:
one of the things you need to do, and this is just as a preliminary rule. With the resumes is you want to make sure and this person if you should, I don't know if this is a real person, we changed the names of most people. You want to make sure that you're always using a software that's going to go through and and check your resume for different types of errors.
And also for punctuation errors for all sorts of things. Because if you're writing a summary like this at the beginning of your resume, like this person is. What you're doing really is you're showing your ability to your writing ability you're showing your do you know how succinct you can, right?
You're showing your, all these sorts of things. And so doing a paragraph like this at the beginning of the resume is perfectly fine. But if you do this it's probably not a good idea because it's going to there's probably going to be a lot of errors and you can see here, just this just Grammerly and pro writing aid.
There's a bunch of other ones like Hemingway and a bunch of. Other company programs that make suggestions the, these that can create problems. I don't like, I don't know what this is up here. I'm assuming this is something you can shoot with your phone and get the resume. I think it's kinda cool, but at the same time I really wouldn't recommend putting something like this at the top of a resume, at least for now until That sort of catches on.
It's just a little bit too techie and could turn people off, but you can see here just on the right. All of these grammatical errors and problems and and different things here that really need to be cleaned up. Now, I'm going to talk briefly about putting the summaries of the top of your resume.
A lot of times when people do this sorts of things with their resumes, they do these because they've gone to a resume coach who may not be a legal related person. And these this to me looks like an in-house resume or a small law firm resume, which I guess it is. But you can see here even just this little stuff, just this spacing and stuff, it's just not something that That most firms want to see the better off you can do.
But when you have a lot of summary like this, and then you have a lot of a lot of texts many times that can hurt you. And the reason it can hurt you is because it gets everything. It makes it look like you're doing a lot of different things and it makes you look like you're not necessarily an expert in anything.
So this particular resume, if I were to see this. Coming through our company I would look at it and I would I would like things about wills and trust and if the person who's estate planning, if I saw that and probate I probably wouldn't like criminal law because I would think that was too diverse or this person really is a generalist.
And they do civil litigation. They do contracts, they do business transaction. So it, because this person is a generalist, all they need to say, you don't really need to have this huge summary. You can just say a legal generalist with experience in most and transactional and litigation practice areas.
This person even does property. So all of this stuff saying you've done all these different things, the problem with this in terms of its market of ability to Sorry, there's all these errors. The problem with all of this information is you really, you don't need all this information.
All you need to say is, skilled, legal, generalists, it's done all these different types of things. And then you can say here that you we're a make it obvious things. It's just crazy. You can say that you were doing primarily litigation or medical malpractice, or I dunno all this different stuff, but you don't need all of this information.
You really need, it needs to be much much more concise. It's just too much information. It makes it a lot of work for the person to read it. And it's annoying. And it's saying that you're a generalist is the same thing as, yes, what's very good about this resume. They don't want to point out is this person has had their own law firm.
For five years or six years, which is good. They've also, we're at this firm for three years and they have a lot of employment stability. They haven't had a lot of jobs. So anybody that hires this person can probably be pretty sure that person's going to stick around I don't think I think you, you just, you don't need to have all these all this stuff here an additional skills.
So what I would recommend probably just putting the admitted, obviously the person's admitted to the Colorado, so all, you just have to say a state, you don't have to say the license number or anything like that. You don't have to say you just have to say the the bar number or the the.
The the fact that the person submitted now, when I look at this, I say to myself, this person got a job in may and they didn't get admitted until the following year, what were they doing? Were they clerking or did they not pass the bar? So I just, there's no reason to put your graduation data on there.
There's nothing wrong with not passing the bar. But you don't need to put that there, also need to put you don't want to put anything about these district and bankruptcy. These are just, you can be admitted to these by motion. So no one really cares about that. That's just, it's not, no, one's going to hire you because of that.
You're just taking up extra space, the mediation certificate. I don't think unless that's some major school or something I don't know that you really want to leave that on there. That's not that necessary. And you probably don't want to have that on there either. You just want to basically say you're admitted the California, the State bar California.
And that's it. And then the law school is good. It's good to put that at the end. I don't know some of these things that have been done here aren't really necessary. You don't need to put that you were a member of the moot court, a woman's law member. I women go to law school.
There's nothing special about being a member of that group. There's nothing special about being a member of the immigration or tax law. And there's nothing special about having been a mentor. And I'm sure there's a lot of resumes we'll talk about today that have a lot of other. Type of information on them that is relevant, but you don't really need to say very much about that.
And you don't need to call it a doctor of law. You can just call a JD or whatever. It's not you don't need to make it sound fancy or anything like that. And and then these affiliations, these are fine. I don't have any problem with that. And then these additional skills are not necessary.
No one is going to hire a 10th year attorney because they know QuickBooks or outlook. That's doesn't mean or PowerPoint you see you take that off. So all in all, this is a good resume. Just needs to be shortened up. That's too long. It needs to be run through professional proofreading programs.
You don't need the summary at the top. And you also don't need to do anything. You just remove the, I would just, as a general rule, not worry about summaries or any of this person is just a generalist and I wouldn't worry about doing all these bullet points, this person's a generalist and has a general practice.
What a law firm is concerned about when they're looking at this, by the way, if it's an employer, is there a concern, can this person make me money? So if you've generated business and this is a successful law firm, and you're the managing partner, you should say something about how much work you know, or how much business you're generated.
The other thing that I don't like here is this person saying they've the beginning of the comedy process for the North Carolina bar. So people do this all the time. They put stuff on their resume that they are admitted to another bar. If this person's applying for jobs in Calla, Colorado a law firm would be very stupid to try to hire them because it's pretty clear that the person may be interested in leaving or going to work in North Carolina otherwise.
They wouldn't be doing that. So anytime your looking at a resume you have to ask yourself all these questions and and one of them is, are we guaranteed to make money from the person from a long time? If the person puts something about another bar on their resume that's going to hurt them.
And the other problem is this person actually has their own law firm. So if they were applying to work in a law firm other law firms are gonna ask why why are they what are they going to want their own firm again, or what's going on with that? So that is that resume.