7 Ways to Deep Clean Your Resume

7 Ways to Deep Clean Your Resume In preparation for going away for the Thanksgiving holiday, I decided to â€Å"deep clean† my kitchen. As I was wiping down the back panel of my stove (the one with all the buttons), it struck me that the Whirlpool logo was light blue. I had never thought twice about the color of that logo in the four years I had lived in this apartment. But now I got curious, and discovered a light blue protective sticker covering up the silver Whirlpool logo that was meant to ornament the stove. I pulled it off, and the appliance now seems just a little bit newer: It shines the way it was intended. Moving on to the sink, I discovered a similar sticker on the metal container that holds my scrubbies. I pulled that one off too. It’s like I have a whole new look to my kitchen! This experience got me thinking: Where else in our lives do we stare at something day after day, accepting it as part of our environment, without thinking to look more carefully? Where do we blindly accept messes and errors that could easily be peeled back to reveal something shiny underneath? Deep Clean Your Resume One place a lot of people have become blind to errors is on their resumes- one area where it is most important to be squeaky clean. Below are seven common spots to look for possible cleaning opportunities: Address, phone and email. Although it’s unlikely you have misspellings in any of these key areas, perhaps you changed a phone number or email address and forgot to change it on your resume? Make sure your address, phone and email are not just correct but also up to date! If you are in a technology field, use a gmail address or paid account and stay away from hotmail and yahoo. Section headings. Have you checked the spelling of the word Achievements (I have seen senior executives’ resumes where the heading is spelled Acheivements)? How about Experience and Activities? Are there any extra letters floating around? Did you correctly spell Extracurricular (I have seen Extracaricular). Not only could errors like these turn off a hiring manager who notices them, but they could prevent an ATS system from recognizing an entire section of your resume. Job titles. One of the most commonly misspelled words on resumes is â€Å"Manager† (often spelled â€Å"Manger†). Check your job titles to make sure they are spelled correctly! Verbs. â€Å"Led† is the past tense of â€Å"Lead† (many people mistakenly write â€Å"Lead†). Also, are you repeating your verbs over and over in various bullets? See what you can do to vary your verbs! Your resume will truly start to shine. And finally, make sure your past jobs use past tense verbs! Often when someone converts a present job to a past job, some of those verbs remain in the present tense. This applies to ALL verbs in the section, not just the ones that start each bullet. For more tips on varying your verbs, view my webinar, Top 10 Ways to Make Resume Writing FUN! Format. Do all your bullets and dates line up with each other? Do you use the same font and font size throughout your resume (unless you have an artistic, consistent reason for using two different fonts)? Is your spacing even? Are your headers all formatted the same way? If not, you have some cleaning up to do! Dates. Line up all your dates format-wise and use consistent formatting (don’t write 1/06 to 2/05 in one spot and 3/2008-4/2011 in another; don’t write December 2004 in one spot and Dec. 2006 in another). Check that all dates are accurate, with proper months and years, listed in reverse chronological order. Also see tip #4 on using past tense verbs consistently in your past jobs. Document Properties and Tracked Changes. If someone else assisted you with your resume, there might be tracked changes and document properties still lurking. To clean up tracked changes, accept all changes and delete all comments. Want more detailed instructions? Check out my article, How to Avoid Embarrassing Editing Marks on Your Documents! To delete document properties such as Author, go to the File tab, click on Check for Issues and then Inspect document. Follow the prompts and your document will be cleaned of whatever information you choose. If you’re applying for jobs or plan to do so in the future, you will benefit from â€Å"deep cleaning† your resume. Do you have additional ideas of steps you can take? Surprise errors found? Please share below, and scrub your resume so that, like the Whirlpool logo on my stove, your accomplishments can shine the way they were intended!

The Harris Matrix Tool Used to Comprehend the Archaeological Past

The Harris Matrix Tool Used to Comprehend the Archaeological Past The Harris Matrix (or Harris-Winchester matrix) is a tool developed between 1969-1973 by Bermudian archaeologist Edward Cecil Harris to assist in the examination and interpretation of the stratigraphy of archaeological sites. The Harris matrix is specifically for the identification of both natural and cultural events which make up a sites history. The construction process of a Harris matrix compels the user to classify the various deposits in an archaeological site as representing events in the lifecycle of that site. A completed Harris Matrix is a schematic that clearly illustrates the history of an archaeological site, based on the archaeologists interpretation of the stratigraphy seen in the excavations. The History of an Archaeological Site All archaeological sites are palimpsests, that is to say, the end result of a series of events, including cultural events (a house was built, a storage pit was dug, a field was planted, the house was abandoned or torn down) and natural events (a flood or volcanic eruption covered the site, the house burned down, organic materials decayed). When the archaeologist walks onto a site, evidence of all those events is there in some form. The archaeologists job is to identify and record the evidence from those events  if the site and its components are to be understood. In turn, that documentation provides a guide to the context of the artifacts found at the site. Context means that artifacts recovered from the site mean something different if they are found in the construction foundations of the house rather than in the burned basement. If a potsherd was found within a foundation trench, it predates the use of the house; if it was found in the basement, perhaps only physically a few centimeters away from the foundation trench and maybe at the same level, it postdates the construction and may be in fact from after the house was abandoned. Using a Harris matrix allows you to order the chronology of a site, and to tie a particular context to a particular event. Classifying Stratigraphic Units to Context Archaeological sites are typically dug in square excavation units, and in levels, whether arbitrary (in 5 or 10 cm [2-4 inch] levels) or (if possible) natural levels, following the visible deposit lines. Information about every level that is excavated is recorded, including depth below surface and volume of soil excavated; artifacts recovered (which could include microscopic plant remains discovered in the laboratory); soil type, color and texture; and many other things as well. By identifying the contexts of a site, the archaeologist can assign Level 12 in excavation unit 36N-10E to the foundation trench, and Level 12 in excavation unit 36N-9E to the context within the basement. Harris Categories Harris recognized three types of relationships between unitsby which he meant groups of levels which share the same context: Units which have no direct stratigraphic correlationUnits which are in superpositionUnits which are correlated as parts of a once-whole deposit or feature The matrix also requires that you identify characteristics of those units: Units which are positive; that is to say, those that represent the upbuild of material to a siteNegative units; units such as pits or foundation trenches which involved the removal of soilInterfaces between those units History of the Harris Matrix Harris invented his matrix in the late 1960s and early 1970s during post-excavation analysis of site records from the 1960s excavation at Winchester, Hampshire in the UK. His first publication was in June 1979, the first edition of The Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy. Originally designed for use on urban historic sites (which stratigraphy tends to be horrendously complex and jumbled), the Harris Matrix is applicable to any archaeological site and has also been used to document changes in historical architecture and rock art. Although there are some commercial software programs that assist in building a Harris matrix, Harris himself used no special tools other than a piece of plain gridded papera Microsoft Excel sheet would work just as well. Harris matrices may be compiled in the field as the archaeologist is recording the stratigraphy in her field notes, or in the laboratory, working from notes, photos, and maps. Sources Barros Garcà ­a JMB. 2004. The Use of the Harris Matrix to Document the Layers Removed during the Cleaning of Painted Surfaces. Studies in Conservation 49(4):245-258.Harris EC. 2014. Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy. London: Academic Press.Harris EC, Brown III MR, and Brown GJ, editors. 2014. Practices in Archaeological Stratigraphy: Elsevier.Higginbotham E. 1985. Excavation Techniques in Historical Archaeology. Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology 3:8-14.Pearce DG. 2010. The Harris Matrix technique in the construction of relative chronologies of rock paintings in South Africa. The South African Archaeological Bulletin 65(192):148-153.Russell T. 2012. No one said it would be easy. Ordering San paintings using the Harris matrix: dangerously fallacious? A reply to David Pearce. The South African Archaeological Bulletin 67(196):267-272.Traxler Ch, and Neubauer W. 2008. The Harris Matrix composer, a new tool to manage archaeological stratigraphy. In: Ioannides M, Addiso n A, Georgopoulos A, and Kalisperis L, editors. Digital Heritage, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia:  Cyprus. p 13-20. Wheeler K. 2000. Theoretical and Methodological Considerations for Excavating Privies. Historical Archaeology 34:3-19.