Nothing can tank your prospects for a job interview quicker than a résumé that inadvertently shows your tech skills as grievously out-of-date. Recruiters and employers are always on the lookout for mentions of dead programming languages, useless tools, and outmoded lingo. While deleting moldy skills and dated programming languages from a résumé might seem like an obvious step, many IT professionals have a knee-jerk tendency to list the entirety of their experience, even if they’d be better served leaving much of it off. In light of that (and the new year approaching), it just might be high time to revamp your résumé’s job descriptions. Here are five things that are likely to give employers and recruiters pause; they’re worthy of elimination:

Anything That Resides on the Local Machine

Yes, you can still write batch files, small exe’s, and more—but none of that really matters in the era of the cloud. Anything related to “local” activity on a PC seems increasingly irrelevant, said Kathy Tullio, senior consultant at Geneca, a Chicago-based custom software development firm. Even if a company’s résumé-scanning process isn’t automated, she added, a résumé with those old skills “still sticks out like a sore thumb.”

COBOL, Fortran, and Other ‘Old’ Languages

If you definitely want to show you’re out of touch, make sure to include any programming language that’s terribly outdated or no longer in widespread use. Unless you’re looking for a job as a COBOL developer, for example, don’t list your facility with that particular language. “I think the temptation is to show a breadth of experience or tenure in the industry,” said Tullio. But your potential employer is just as likely to wonder how old your résumé is, and whether or not you’ve learned anything new since the turn of the century. The same holds true for certifications: erase the less-popular and out-of-use ones.

Certain Foundational Skills

If you’re keeping an older language on your résumé to show how long you’ve worked with relational databases and SQL, delete it and just say “experience in relational databases and SQL.” While listing older roles and skills can sometimes show you have a deep foundation in a particular technology, getting too specific in your wording can sometimes date you.

Programmer

Use “developer” in place of “programmer” on your résumé. “While ‘programmer’ isn’t a dirty word, it just dates your skills,” said Kirstie Fiora, staffing manager in Technology Contract Staffing at recruiter WinterWyman. “’Developer’ brings you into today’s language. There’s language specific to a time period when you’re doing a job search, so make sure your résumé is reflective of that.” If you were a COBOL programmer, for instance, and moved into business analysis, drop COBOL completely and change your title from your programming job to "developer." That will ensure that everyone understands you have a technical background without you mentioning something that’s obsolete.

Out-of-Step Acronyms

Keep your terminology current, suggested Fiora: for example, using "SQA" instead of "QA": “If you haven't been on the job market in years, you'll need to change the words and titles used in your résumé to be current for Web crawlers to find you in keyword searches.” Find a job description for a role that you want, and then replace any outdated terms in your résumé with the equivalent ones used in the job description. And don’t forget to spell out certain roles and skills on first usage: "Certified Scrum Master" alongside "CSM," for instance, and "LAMP" with "Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP."

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