Transcript
Description:
In this video, Harrison Barnes is inspecting a resume of an attorney with three categories of experience. Since the attorney is less than four years out of law school, he suggests placing educational information at the top and admissions right beneath it. There are typical mistakes found in this resume that we need to eliminate.
- A lot of typos and spacing issues
- There are employment gaps.
- There are a lot of temporary jobs on the resume.
- Internship descriptions are drawing too much attention.
- Lack of focus on the resume.
- The resume shows that the candidate prefers doing things that are related to government and public interest. Not showing interest in working in a law firm.
Transcript:
So this is another resume here. And, of course, the name and so forth have taken off.
You can see, here again, there's a lot of typos; I don't know our spacing issues, so you need to go through and fix all those. So this is something that you know, that you need to like your resume is an essential thing from proofreading.
And how quickly you can give through ideas and how quickly you can do you know, you can present things. So I don't know if these are these typos; we converted it for you. I don't think they are beaten to make sure that is so this particular resume, and I want to talk a little bit about it and some of the issues that I'm seeing with that right now.
So typically, let's see here w when you're four years less or more out of law school what you want to do as you want to put your education first. And then your emissions typically go beneath all of that information, and you would put that at the end or something. And you also want to try to be very clear with your language, but I'll talk about that in a second.
But this particular resume right here, there's a bunch of things I'd like to talk about. So the first is this person is now working in an in white Plains doing it looks working, in-house doing a for doing real estate related things. And they've been doing that for the past year. Before that, it looks like they were a law clerk; that's protected, that's fine. But 20 to graduate in 2018, may of 2018. So that would be November 2018. So they were a law clerk after graduating.
Okay. And then they've been doing this since June. Okay. So the pro some of the problems with this resume is actually a fascinating resume because this person is making many very typical types of mistakes that people make. And so I'd like, really, to hone in on that.
There's a couple of problems. The first thing is there, there are some employment gaps here, which
I, which make me a little bit nervous. So there's an employment gap. From the time this person got out of law school to tell, they got this job as a law clerk, and then they were only there for a month, and then they were gone for six months, and then they took this job here.
And so I don't like that. And I don't; I would like some explanation for that. And then you can see here like they were a legal intern during law school. The description of what the person did as a legal intern is much longer than the description of even what they're doing now.
And the same thing is happening with this other in-house internship. And then, it's also called corporate and commercial experience. So really, what this person needs to do in this resume, by the way, needs a lot of work you would have experienced here. You probably don't; I don't even know that this particular this is it's only one month, so I don't know if this is necessary to have that position if it was only for a month.
Certainly, and then this particular one was for three months; it was during school. So I don't know how relevant that position is. It's why only three months would be the question. So there's a lot of short jobs on here. And then this one was a person was in-house.
Law school. So that would be another question as well is this legal internship is that really necessary. So I might even put these internships down and try to make that that you don't draw as much attention to that.
And you just put that down that this is your current position right now. And then, of course, fixing all of these spacing and other issues. So it would be a good idea as well. And then I'm just going to go through this, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but these internships, you have too much stuff here.
Now, the thing I don't like about this resume and working in a law firm, don't want to work in a law firm, or you don't want to work for a company. Then this is actually a perfect resume. But the problem with it is that you're saying everything but work in a law firm on here.
So you see corporate experience, you see public interest experience, you're saying all these different things. Whereas really what's going on here and this is a summer internship, so that's okay. You need to these; you shouldn't be separating them because you're really saying, I prefer to do all of these other things that are related to government and public interest.
And that's a problem. And a lot of times people, if you want to work in a law firm, they may not like that because it seems like this is where your interests lie. And so that might be this is a good resume if you want to do public interests and then deemphasize this, but all this stuff really you have litigation, you have loans you have it's just the resumes all over the place.
So it needs to be more focused. Also, you're working in New York, but you've only taken the New Jersey bar. So people are gonna wonder about that. Being fluent and all of these foreign languages may actually detract from you, and there's nothing wrong with being fluent in these languages.
You could think that will help you get a job, but it may actually detract from the message that whatever you want to do. So if you want to be a public interest attorney and work for an Islamic company or these different groups and so forth, that's fine.
Here, I don't know what this is but this group, youth group founder, but seems to be where your interests lay. So your interests are really in things related to whatever, volunteering and helping people, doing that sort of thing, and being part of these religious and other types of groups, which is fine. Still, it doesn't read like a law resume.
So it doesn't read like somebody that wants to work in a law firm reads like somebody that wants to do something else. And then, the question people will wonder if he took the New York bar and what happened with that. And then you have, oh, this stuff here.
This concentration stuff doesn't matter to you; none of this really matters. These are not honors.
Activities and things that you did. These, none of this stuff may be the secretary of the Muslim students association is an honor. I don't know how big that group is or anything that points out things to do with religious affiliation and so forth. There's often more problematic than some resumes.
I, if someone's the secretary of the Christian students association or the. I don't know that the Protestant association of the Catholic students association would put that on their resume. But, certainly, there's a demand for diversity in law firms and so forth, but really what law firms want is what they want to see in most organizations is they want to see some focus.
So this resume is very common that a lot of people do. This sort of resume will hurt you because what you're doing here is you're showing that if you want to work in a law firm, everything about this resume is showing that you have an interest in doing things really that aren't related to the type of work that law firms do.
That your interests are different and that, and that you have there's nothing wrong with any of this, here you're doing intellectual and sports law, but then, the only experience has been. All these other things and then emphasizing these other languages is good if you believe that will help you.
But I think that a lot of times and then this is all related to loans and so forth, but then this is a completely different, these are completely different types of jobs. So I'm, I'm left very confused because there are just many things going on here. So if you want to clean this up, and then the next time we do a resume review, I'd love to look at it.
I I do think this resume does need some work. And it's just that the issue is here. It's just not focused enough.
