Small Business

5 Smart Ways to Eliminate Typos on Your Resume

By Dave Johnson

Updated on: September 3, 2009 / 6:52 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

You know what they say: The difference between landing a job and not even getting the interview is inserting "Career break in 1999 to renovate my horse" into your resume.

Everyone knows how important it is to ensure your resume is error-free (Rick even wrote about the dangers of resume typos recently), but that's often easier said than done. What you need are some tips and strategies for eliminating those embarrassing typos.

Here are five sure-fire ones you should practice before the next job interview, as reported by The Washington Post:

Review your edit later. You can't confidently correct a resume while you're writing it, because you see what you intended to write, not what's really on the screen. Wait several hours or, even better, a day or two.
Get someone else to edit it for you. Not a replacement for reviewing it yourself, but a second set of eyes is essential for seeing your words fresh and impartially.
Print it out. It's easier to see many kinds of errors on the printed page that you'd miss on a computer screen.
Read it aloud. Just like printing a resume makes it look different than when it's on the screen, reading it lets you hear the words, and it's only then you can realize some things just don't make sense.
Read it from the bottom up. Reading it out of sequence can disrupt the logical flow that helps your brain make sense of things that are grammatically incorrect or have other language problems. Also, you'll see the end with fresh eyes, whereas ordinarily you'll be burnt out by the time you reach the end and more likely to miss errors.

And while you're job hunting, be sure to read some of our other job search tips:

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