We all have those job-seeker cringes. Tripping into a potential boss just as she extends her hand to shake. Calling an interviewer by the wrong name. Sending a resume with the wrong telephone number.

Those resume gaffes can do more than induce cringes. They can keep us from jobs that we are qualified for.

Resolutions for a better life are taking their first timid steps into the new year. Professionals ready to move into better jobs and college students applying for internships mean resumes are being written.

And so many of them will be riddled with errors. Despite our best efforts, we often either don’t know how to write the ever-elusive succinct rundown of our lives or we work a huge error (or several) into those summaries.

Matt Salo, director of the health and human services committee of the National Governors Association, will never forget the resume he received several years ago from a recent college graduate. This person did not have much work experience, so he added a bulleted list of skills:

¢ Strong Work Ethic

¢ Attention to Detail

¢ Team Player

¢ Self Motivated

¢ Attention to Detail

Salo did not call him back, although he sometimes wishes he had called to point out that “attention to detail” was listed twice.

“You really feel torn,” Salo said. “You want to call these people up and say, ‘Stop sending out this resume.’ But you don’t. There are so many of them.”

Another resume that Salo received beat the attention-to-detail guy. A woman sent her resume and cover letter without deleting someone else’s editing, including such comments as “I don’t think you want to say this about yourself here” and notes that pointed out grammatical and spelling errors.

“Apparently she had just taken what she got back and forwarded it along,” Salo said. “Needless to say, that person wasn’t hired, either.”

Fatal errors

Several readers recalled their horror stories of applying for jobs with “public” in the title and realizing after they sent out multiple resumes that they had omitted the “l.”

Erin Piateski realized after she sent out her resumes this year that she had given the wrong dates for her most recent job, turning it from a month-and-a-half gig to a year-and-a-month one. If that was true, it meant she had two full-time jobs at the same time.

For a year.

In Boston and Washington.

Finally, a potential employer pointed out the error. But that company didn’t offer her the job.

“I really hoped this wouldn’t ruin my chances of getting a job,” she said. “I don’t know if that was a reason or not.” She was hired in November – after applying with a corrected resume – by an engineering firm in Arlington, Va.

It’s hard to hear stories like this and not think, “Well, I would never :” You would read the resume over a million times. Perhaps get a friend or two to check it out. Of course, there’s spell check. So why do careless errors creep onto a piece of paper that is so important?

Melissa Fireman thinks it has to do with being so stressed out about the job search.

“I think it’s nerves more than anything,” said Fireman, founder of career management firm Washington Career Services. “People just get nervous before they send it out.”

Just relax

And so job seekers tense up, press the enter button and realize later (or not) that they sent a cover letter without the resume attached. (Happens all the time, Fireman said.) Or that they forgot to include the job code, making it nearly impossible for the recruiter to figure out what they were applying for. In a previous job at a major media organization, Fireman and co-workers tossed many of those resumes.

Sometimes the mistakes that job seekers make are a little more subtle. Resumes are too vague. They are written in prose form. Or resume senders get too detailed about skills and former jobs that don’t matter to the one they are seeking, said Paul Villella, president and chief executive of Reston, Va.-based recruiting firm HireStrategy Inc.

Take your time, he said, and think about what it is you’ve really accomplished.

If there isn’t too much experience on your resume, think about what your goals are. Then write it all down.

“What do I do well? What did I achieve? Those are the things most compelling and relevant for the employer,” he said.

And he does not mean cringe-compelling.