Get the Resume Right

For the first few years I was in the recruiting business, the biggest frustration was when I knew that I had a great candidate for a position, but that candidate was rejected out of the box because the client company didn't like the resume. The people I was recruiting were very well qualified for the jobs, but often they wouldn't even get an interview because the hiring manager at the client company just didn't get a good feeling about the candidate from the resume.

For a while I thought that the solution was to find candidates who had better resumes, but what I found was that most people were using variations of the same format. They would find a template somewhere on the internet or from the resume of a friend or relative, and then just put in their own information. They would send out these resumes "en masse" and wait for the calls to start coming in.

Finally, after enough rejections to fill a large barrel, I began to think that maybe the problem was that the resumes just weren't doing a good job of letting the hiring companies know who these people really were, and why they would be a good fit for the jobs. So, I began to ask the employers what they wanted to see and what they didn't want to see on these resumes. It was like the light came on in the darkness. That's when I began to fully understand something that should have been so simple in the beginning; that is, companies hire people, not just skill sets or experiences...and most of the resumes that I and these companies were seeing didn't say much at all about the people behind them.

The result was that I began to scrutinize the resumes very carefully before I sent them to employers. I'd ask myself, "If this is all I can learn about this person, do I want to meet him/her?" More often than not, the answer was a resounding "NO". What I noticed was that when candidates followed all the resume "rules", they were unlikely to get an interview. When they ignored most of the rules and told a little about themselves, they started getting interviews and job offers.

My business went up nearly 60% when I started reviewing and revising candidate resumes.

In this economy, job opportunities are too precious to waste. A candidate whose resume is rejected outright rarely gets a second chance. That's why it's so critical to get it right the first time.

At Austin Career Services, that's what we do. We help individuals who are very good at what they do, but don't know how to market themselves. It all starts with the resume. The only purpose of the resume is to help you get an interview. That's all it does. After that, there are other important steps in the job hunting process, such as the interview, compensation negotitation, and how to leave your current position in the right manner.

We will discuss those areas in another post.