Transcript
Description:
In this video, Harrison Barnes explains why you must always proofread your attorney’s resume before submission. Many people believe punctuation, grammar, and proofreading are just minor details. However, In the legal profession - which relies heavily on precise language - these skills can make or break a candidate’s resume. Barnes strongly suggests using spell-checking programs to avoid any potential grammar and spelling errors, even punctuation marks. Here are some of the consequences of a poorly written resume:
- It draws experience to lack of detail and other important things.
- It demonstrates your weakness instead of strengths.
- It causes the employers to question the applicant’s intelligence.
Transcript:
Okay. Legal personal experience. Okay.
Okay. So I'm not going to tell you anything bad that, I don't that that I consider unethical, but I don't know if you need to list, how much part time you did and how much full-time if you were an attorney during those dates, you're an attorney during those dates.
If anyone asks you, you should tell them, but I don't know that you need to draw attention to the fact that you were an attorney than staff attorney that, you know, and draw attention to the fact that you're a part time. Now you can look at right here. I always show people this always look at Grammarly.
There's also pro writing aid but you need to really look at your resume very closely and and make sure. You know that accompanying some properties? No, that's good. So you need to go through and proofread things. So I'm just looking at this and this is like a very obvious thing that after party there's this, so everyone needs to really very closely proofread your resumes because because if you don't proofread your resume very closely, it just draws experience to lack of detail and other things that are very important for an attorney in any job.
And it shows you're almost like demonstrating your weaknesses and this doesn't have to say you can't do these jobs, but but this important thing to make sure, cause you can see all these issues when you see here, like ellipses are loud enough
and used to be changed and, third party subpoenas and all this stuff. So this stuff needs to be done very closely. And and you can even put down, your dates of employment to say 2002 to 2020 during this time served as an attorney staff attorney and during my last eight years as the secretary and corporate counsel.
And And this is a lot of detail here, so no one needs all this information. So you need to probably, get this down into a couple of lines. And and anytime you guys are writing something or ladies or lighting something, you just, you just, you think about how do I use fewer words because work experiences, same as experience and then this person, everyone, a lot of times uses a lot of words.
And when you make, when you use a lot of words, when you say more than you need to, the problem is it makes people work and nobody likes to have to do extra work. So your job as an attorney is to simplify information, to make things began redrafting so just this all needs to be really slimmed down with a few lines that gives people enough to talk about to understand, and then this, you don't need this.
And then and then here you graduate in 96. Almost, one of the things I don't like here is and I don't mean this in a negative way. But one of the problems here is that this is a really nice run. Most people do not have 18 year runs or I don't know how many 18 year runs and I, and an employer.
So I don't think anybody's going to be too excited that you were the HR manager and the library while you were practicing law. So I don't know how important that is. And I don't know that they're going to be that excited that you spend a year as a tax. And then you were the director of administration and all these early jobs you had in your career.
So what I would almost recommend doing would be to, it would be very nice to have this particular position just at the top. And then and then maybe a couple of lines which is what this person did which I liked of between 2012 and 14. They took 12 years and they put down just a couple of lines of what they did.
And so I would just say here during the period of 2000 and, whatever, but these years here, when you graduated in 1997, I believe, but worked as a attorney for a law firm. And too long, no law firm to two different companies for something or got experience doing that.
That's how I would handle that. And that's just going to look a lot better. It's and then and then it's going to be look consistent. And then I don't know, this is all in the same area of Pennsylvania. You can put that down there and that's how I would handle that because you don't, again, you obviously what you're doing and you were good at your last job.
Otherwise you wouldn't have kept you there that long and you wouldn't have stayed. So you have a lot of very good things, but I would recommend. If it was me, I would try to really make sure that this information is consolidated because otherwise it just detracts from the overall strength of the resume there.
And then, you always want to be careful sometimes when you talk about the whistleblower officer and these kinds of things and any time it looks like, you may be someone that could potentially be adverse to where you're working, that people don't like to see that.
So I just would be very careful with that, but other than that, it looks good. Okay. So this resume and try to consolidate everything and make it smaller. Okay.
