What small resume errors say about you

Your resume is your opportunity to sell yourself in the briefest format possible. Your entire history of work ethic, sacrifices, and contributions are represented on a single page. If you’re a student or graduate, all your sleepless nights studying and hard-sought achievements in college will boil down to a single page. Landing the first interview comes down to how well your resume represents your credibility, experience, attention to detail, and dedication.

So what does it say about you if there are mistakes?

Your resume is perhaps the most important document you will ever draft, and you bear all the risk and all the reward for its presentation. If it contains mistakes, what should employers conclude about your performance when you no longer bear all the risk and reward from your actions, but they do? The most rational conclusion is that your mistakes would worsen if the liability were transferred to the employer.

With an average of 250 applicants per job opening, employers need to weed out applicants quickly. One of the easiest ways to start is by deleting resumes with mistakes because there are plenty without mistakes.

Your resume may be perfectly legible, even with a few grammatical or punctual mistakes, but that’s not the point. The point is that any applicant who can’t be trusted to get things right when they bear all the liability certainly can’t be trusted to get things right when their employer bears all the liability.