Swipe Right on my Resume
You’ve worked for hours on your resume. There are no grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors. You’ve even impressed yourself with how beautifully and comprehensively you’ve captured your accomplishments and expertise on a single page. You’ve submitted your masterpiece to at least a dozen posted jobs you know you’d be perfect for.
Crickets.
Is the hiring process just taking an extra long time? Maybe. Did the job get canceled or filled and someone forgot to take it down? Could be. Is there some critical job requirement that they forgot to mention? Potentially…but probably not.
You have to wonder; maybe it’s you. Assuming the role really is a great match, more likely it’s just your resume.
Recruiters and hiring managers spend about 6 seconds screening a resume. Maybe less now that it is so easy to quickly swipe left or right with today’s applicant tracking software.
However, the reasons for “swiping left” are still the same now as a decade ago: the person screening the resume can’t match the EXACT job requirements to your EXACT experience in those 6 seconds. The labor market is mostly irrelevant.
If the top requirement listed for a job is 5 years of experience selling technical equipment to large manufacturers then don’t bury that qualification deep in your resume. Put that exact experience in your summary, even if that role was not your most recent, and size of your client accounts was subjective. Save the nuance for the interview.
Don’t make the recruiters work for it. Screening is the first step, and recruiters are looking for the quickest way to effectively sort resumes into the “maybe” and “no” piles. Customize your resume for each submittal. Don’t send out a generic resume and hope it fits what a particular hiring manager is looking for. Especially since they tell you what that is.
Give them a clear reason to swipe right.
Written by: Allison Small, Co-founder and VP of Program, TalentCMO.
Links and Other Interesting Stuff:
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There are variety of platforms where you can post your resume when looking for a job. Check out Indeed.com.
Check out this sweet Career Showcase (a standalone microsite built for candidates….compare it to the Career page on most corporate sites!) that we built for one of our clients.