Does your resume suffer from too much of a good thing?

Are you asking employers to jump through too many mental hoops to figure out what job you’d best fit in?

Perhaps.

Almost every day, a resume crosses my desk with an Areas of Expertise section that lists 5-10 bulleted “areas of expertise.”

Nonsense. You can’t be an expert in 10 things.

Worse, employers won’t read past the first few bullets.

Still worse, employers will give up and move on to the next resume.

That’s because, as the old marketing maxim says, a confused mind says NO.

But don’t believe me.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s Wall Street Journal, reviewing the book “The Art of Choosing,” by Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School. One of her experiments in the book, known as the “jam study,” is especially relevant to your resume:

In a Palo Alto, Calif., supermarket known for its exceptionally vast range of products, she set up two different booths offering shoppers the chance to sample various unusual preserves. One booth offered 24 different options; the other only six. You would think that, with more choices in the first booth, more shoppers who stopped there would find a flavor they liked and go on to buy a jar. But the opposite happened: People tried more samples and bought a lot more jam at the booth with six varieties.

The people who stopped at the 24-jam booth didn’t say: “Please take away most of these options so I can more easily make a decision.” They simply felt overwhelmed and less willing to make any choice at all.

Does your resume offer the equivalent of 24 flavors of jam?

If so, employers may feel overwhelmed and be less willing to choose you to interview.

Solution: Always do the thinking for your reader. Limit their choices to your best, most-relevant 3-4 skills on your resume, whether it’s a Guerrilla Resume or not.

You’ll find more unconventional insights like these on our Free Guerrilla Job Search Audio CD. Why not give it a listen?