Everyone has a resume that they send to their prospective employers.  And these days with the unemployment rate so high, the resume has to look perfect to get in the door.  So some people lie on them.

Now not everyone lies on their resume but they do embellish a little bit.  I try not to embellish at all since I am afraid I would be called out on it.  Some people their resume is a large pack of lies.

There are a few things you have to do to get a good looking resume.

• choose your diction/prose properly.  Have a friend edit it.  Take their edits and yours and meld them together.  Then try another friend. etc.  You want to polish it off as best as you can.
• spellcheck.  bad spelling will kill your resume.
• standard document formats only.  I strongly suggest word format (not the new .docx format but standard .doc format).  Or pdf is an acceptable format most of the time.  Dont do excel, powerpoint, pagemaker, text, webpage, etc.  I would offer my resume in the .doc format and mention to the recruiter that you have it in other formats if that works best for them.  Flexible is good.  But try to work with the standards.
• find a good format/layout that is clean and neat.  Most recruiters will only spend like 15 second (maybe more) looking at your resume the first time.  They need to be able to scan it and see the right information.  if it is not well laid out then things will get missed or it will be painful for the recruiter to read.  Either way, you wont get the job.
• dont put info on the resume that doesnt need to be there.  Objective?  your object is to get a job.  Anything else you put down is part of the “bag if lies” I referred to earlier.  All it is is filler.  Also references?  skip that info.  All those people are going to be very biased for you and say you walk on water.  That might have been important twenty years ago but today it is just a waste of space.  Hobbies?  they dont care about you hobbies.  The more you have the less likely you will work extra hours when needed to.  marriage and kids?  never ever put this down.  They have no need to know about it.  All these things that are filler, are distracting to the resume reviewer (recruiter).  As someone that used to go through twenty to well over a hundred resumes a week, every week to review them for possibility of putting them in the interview cycle, I could not stand those filler blocks.  Those blocks distracted me from the meat of the resume and people could get dropped because of it.

What I used to do every quarter is have my quarterly fight with my father.  Now my father is a brilliant brilliant man.  He is not a geek in the modern day definition.  He is an Aerospace Engineer building advanced military aircraft.  So these “fights” were arguments over the diction/prose in my resume.  At the time I was a consultant and I had to keep it up to date.  He and I would argue over the smallest little change of wording or which word to use.  Yeah it put a strain on our relationship for a few days and we didnt want to talk to the other.  But what it did was give me one of the best resumes out there for someone with my experience/knowledge.  My father and I havent had that argument in a while.  although I am not looking for a new job or plan on looking for a new job, I think I should dig up the resume and start the right again with him.  the more often you update the resume, the more likely you wont forget things and there is less to do each time so it is less painful.