CIO — Your IT resume provides recruiters and hiring managers with a critical first impression of who you are and what you offer. Working in a field as competitive as IT means you have to do everything you can to ensure your resume get noticed. Making a bad first impression (or no impression at all) is a sure way to get your resume moved into the 'No' pile.

"They [resumes] get eliminated for all sorts of reasons just to get the pile down to something manageable," says Rick Endres, president of the Washington Network and former CIO of the U.S. Congress, as well deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Commerce for Technology Policy. To help you build a better resume, CIO.com talked to Endres and other experts to identify common errors and some not-so-common ones.

CIO — Your IT resume provides recruiters and hiring managers with a critical first impression of who you are and what you offer. Working in a field as competitive as IT means you have to do everything you can to ensure your resume get noticed. Making a bad first impression (or no impression at all) is a sure way to get your resume moved into the 'No' pile.

"They [resumes] get eliminated for all sorts of reasons just to get the pile down to something manageable," says Rick Endres, president of the Washington Network and former CIO of the U.S. Congress, as well deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Commerce for Technology Policy. To help you build a better resume, CIO.com talked to Endres and other experts to identify common errors and some not-so-common ones.

IT Resume Mistake #1: Typos, Misspellings and Bad Grammar

Come on, folks, we shouldn't even have to mention this one and yet, according to the experts, job candidates are disqualified all the time for making typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. "Most jobs put a premium on communication skills. Hiring managers and recruiters aren't going to be interested if you can't communicate well on your own behalf," says Endres.

IT Resume Mistake #2: Too Much Technology Jargon

Job seekers commonly flood the experience section of their resumes with examples of tools and technologies, making it difficult to distinguish achievements from technology. You want both technical and nontechnical readers to understand what you've done.

Jennifer Hay, Credentialed IT Resume Writer with ITResumeService.com, offers this example of an achievement statement that blends technology with well-understood achievements.:

"Developed a hybrid strategy to keep costs down by using data center hardware with SAN deployment for high-availability data, and cloud-based storage with Amazon S3 and Box.com for backup and archival.

"Select those top tools that are most important to your career goals and integrate those into your resume. Your remaining tools and technologies can be added in a section on your resume titled "Technical Skills" or "Technology Profile," says Hay.

IT Resume Mistake #3: Poor Resume File Name

"Almost every resume that I see says things like resume1 or resumeshort as opposed to the person's name or perhaps the position they are applying for," says Endres. If it's being filed somewhere on a PC, you want to make it as easy as possible for your resume to be found. You certainly don't want to rely on someone having to open it up in order to figure out what it is and who it's from.

IT Resume Mistake #4: Making Your Resume the Wrong Length

IT professionals often rely on advice they encounter for nontechnical resumes. For example, the length of the resume, "For IT professionals, it's often not realistic to limit it to two pages. I commonly write resumes that are 2.5 pages long, with another for education, certifications and a technical profile," says Hay.

Endres says that IT professionals should aim to get their resumes down to two, at most three, pages. "If you got something important to say, I don't think it hurts for you to add supplemental information in the email that would be evidence of your claims."

Your resume has technical details, certifications, professional development information, along with your technology profile. This information takes up space. "Technical hiring managers aren't satisfied with this minimal description. They want to know how you did it and what technology you used. They want to know with which technologies you have skills and recent experience. Most IT professionals still have a long list of tools, processes and methodologies to include," says Hay.