4 types of accomplishments to NOT include on your resume

Accomplishments are what give your resume the wow factor it needs to impress any recruiter. If you want a resume that scores well with every employer, you must carefully craft the accomplishments section to suit their needs. Remember, you are using your accomplishments to demonstrate how great your work ethic is and how often you achieve good results. This is why you must think several times before adding any of these accomplishments to your resume:

1. Achievements that are simply too old

You are creating a resume for a 2023 job hunt. The first thing you do? Write a list of accomplishments from your old job back in 1998. WRONG! Accomplishments lose their impact and power when there is too much of a time gap between then and now. The markets, circumstances, and technologies fluctuate a lot over a few years, and employers want to see achievements that involve the latest factors. Whenever you add achievements to your resume, ensure that they are not older than 10-15 years. Also, avoid adding accomplishments related to technology or practices that are no longer in use.

2. Obvious exaggerations of accomplishments

Hiring managers may read through resumes fast, but they spot exaggerations right off the bat. If you are working for a $5 million company and claim to have brought in $15 mil worth of sales on your resume, an employer would be able to spot that exaggeration very easily. And the worst part? They won’t consider it a mere embellishment. Most hiring managers would consider such a statement to be an outright lie. It is a known fact that more than 55 percent of Americans lie on their resumes. However, a trend doesn’t become the right thing to do just because a majority does it. Do you think anyone would want to hire a person that lies on their resume?

3. Accomplishments that reveal proprietary information

We always advise you to back your accomplishments with real data from your past jobs. But you need to be careful in doing so. Not every employer is lenient with the disclosure of their proprietary information to competitors. If any of your accomplishments involve trade secrets that a competitor should not see, you must remove them from your resume. Revenue figures, production methods, and business or marketing plans all can be sensitive data that should not be exposed to other employers. The safest route to take? Use information and data available to the public on annual reports to quantify your achievements.

4. Irrelevant accomplishments

You have worked in the hospitality trade for nine years and are now considering shifting careers to the nonprofit industry. You create a resume that highlights a ton of impressive hospitality accomplishments. However, a potential nonprofit owner who views your resume would not see an impressive list of achievements. All they would see is a bunch of irrelevant qualifications that add no value to the job at hand. When you are creating a resume for a nonprofit employer, you must highlight the achievements that are relevant to the field, such as any community service programs you’ve organized and launched. Similarly, when you don’t have related achievements to add to your resume, you should highlight transferable skills.