“Résumés are the heartbeat of a career search,” says Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, a career and workplace adviser at Glassdoor. So, the last thing you want to do is, making silly mistakes because your resume is the main document that has the potential to make first good impression on the employer within 10-20 seconds of time-frame. Don’t waste those precious 15 seconds by making mistakes.

Following are some common mistakes that people make while designing a resume:

Bad Picture: Resume is your chance to enter any big or renewed organization but if you are going to put unprofessional picture in it, the chances will be high for your rejection because hiring personnel will be unable to avoid that picture and therefore will not focus on your achievements and work history. You can add only one picture that should be a professional headshot taken by a photographer in a studio. Please avoid inserting pictures of your picnic time, selfies, group pictures and wedding pictures. Frankly, no employer is interested to see you in a party mood, they look for a decent, well-groomed and well-dressed candidates for their company.

Incorrect Contact Details: Please check and recheck your contact details before sending your resume to the employer because incorrect details will lead you towards losing a great work opportunity. How can someone expect an interview call without correct and complete contact details?

In Pakistan, most of the girls do not provide their personal contact number in their CVs and resumes, instead they provide their brother’s or parent’s number because of the fear that they will be stalked and start getting unknown calls and messages. Whereas, it’s totally a wrong perception and affects your entire career life.

Professional email ID: Every little detail counts! An unprofessional email id is highly inappropriate, such as rockyahmad@gmail.com or ayeshainnocent@yahoo.com etc. is not going to get you an interview call. Use a professional email ID in your resume such as ahmad.saad90@gmail.com

Bad Layout: Your resume should give neat and clean look at the very first sight. Take good care of line spacing, font size, boarders, proper paragraphing and bullets.

In short, consider an employer your mother and resume as your room. So, keep it as neat as possible to avoid bad impression.

Avoid grammatical and typo errors. Recheck your document before sending it to an employer.

Multicolor Font: I am sure your kids love to see colorful pages but not an employer! The most unprofessional mistake is to add more than 3 colors in the font. Use appropriate colors like Blue, grey and black only, or you can also provide totally black and white resume.

Use only one font. Do not use more than one font in your resume.

Too long or too short resume: Your resume should not exceed 2 pages and should not be as short as half A4 page. Longer resume gets boring and shorter one fails to provide necessary details.

Tell the Truth: Be truthful in whatever you write! Nobody is going to punish you for not having extra skills or less number of experience. Honesty will lead you to a brighter future. It sometimes happens that someone has mentioned a specific skill and is asked to perform that skill live on an interview/test day. So, to avoid embarrassment, don’t make such mistakes.

Set Privacy as Public: If you are opting for an online resume or making a resume on online job portal sites like BrightSpyre, please make sure to set its privacy as “Public” so that employer can access your work history and other information to shortlist you.

Sending Same Resume for Every Job: Its a big mistake! Every job and every organization has different requirements for a job position in their company. So the concept of “one size that fits all” is totally wrong! Edit your resume every time you apply for a job.