In my years as an executive recruiter for startups, I reviewed dozens and sometimes even hundreds of resumes every week.

And all but a handful ended up in the virtual trash can. My job was to select the top few candidates to talk to, which meant constantly rejecting people — or perhaps more accurately, rejecting the digital representations of the documents that represent people, a.k.a. resumes, because that was all I had to go on — and I hated doing it as much as you hated having it done to you.

I knew that you were wondering what happened and why you didn’t hear back about that job, since you were so confident that the description that we posted was perfect for you. (At least you said that in your cover note… and you wouldn’t BS me, would you?)

And really, maybe it was a perfect job for you… but I never got a chance to find out, because your resume didn’t tell me what I needed to know in order to call you to talk about it.

• Maybe yours was the one that listed your first job as “Manger” of marketing. Um, well, OK, then. Either you have the wrong background (I’m sure manger must be an interesting job, if I knew what it was) or you are just a terrible proofreader. Which of course means you’re not the best candidate to be a marketing manager. So into the trash it goes.
• Or maybe yours was that action-packed resume with four different fonts in three colors and three different type sizes and indents (you think I’m making this stuff up, don’t you? I’m not… all of these are real examples).  I did give that o
• Or maybe you were the person who sent me three diffeent resumes — one nine pages long, one five pages long, and the short one was only short because they decided to leave off any specifics about their jobs in order to save space. Um, no, thanks, but I only have a moment to decide if you’re right or not, so if you can’t even create a single document to tell me what I need to know, I’m not feeling like you’re up to the challenges of the executive sales role I’m screening for.

There are hundreds of possible reasons that your resume didn’t make the cut for a specific search I was working on, and the truth is that most of those reasons could easily have been remedied. Spell-check, having someone else proofread for you, or just a little thought about what someone reading your resume really needs to see in order to want to talk to you could have made all the difference.

In a lot of things in life, done is better than perfect… but when it comes to resumes, so much is at stake that aiming to have it really hit the mark is worth the time and attention to get it perfect.