Here’s [[Resume Criticism|an old post I wrote about resumes]] back in March of 2005, which was interesting to read again, because basically my advice hasn’t changed. Maybe I’m a tiny bit less idealistic, or… maybe not, because I’m still mostly pretty idealistic about things like this. I’ve looked at a couple friends’ resumes lately and found them to be rife with minor grammatical errors, poor style and inconsistent use of punctuation, not to mention guilty of having canned/basic layouts and designs with typical fonts and even worse, inconsistent line spacing/indentation. Maybe I exaggerate just a little to make this point, but for the most part all that was there.

The guy whose resume I’ve just looked at and regarding which had sent a long list of comments said, “Three people from big companies with experience already proofread my resume and yet you still managed to find errors. You have a very good eye then.”

Not especially, because the people looking at resumes for hiring I would imagine already notice this stuff (unless it’s just me), and either they weren’t the actual resume-reader people (i.e., he showed his resume to the wrong people), or else they didn’t want to bother pointing out a long list of basic mistakes, or else resume-reader people notice things more subconsciously than I do. But this guy was complaining that he’s been having trouble landing a job, which is evidence that //something// isn’t working right, and I’m putting two and two together and thinking that it //could possibly help// in general based on observations of situations like this to polish one’s resume to grammatic perfection and aesthetically pleasing stylistic shine.