Does your resume fetch you interviews?
Over this past week I reviewed and re-wrote a number of resumes for my clients. The biggest problem I always see with resumes is that they’re written from the perspective of the candidate, rather than for the interviewer.
Take the resumes where people put in every experience they’ve ever had in the hopes that the hiring manager’s eyes will happen upon some snippet of a bullet point that will entice them to call the candidate. Hiring managers are busy. Very, very busy, and reading dozens of resumes is deathly boring. Make the effort to figure out your best examples and ONLY include them on your resume. If you met the hiring manager while waiting for a train and only had a minute to tell them about your relevant experiences, which ones float to the top of your head?
Writing a resume can also be likened to building your case to win an argument. Here’s an example, if you’re fighting with your best friend about where to go on vacation, you don’t throw in extraneous information about the Gross Domestic Product of your ideal spot, or the cost of real estate. Who cares about those characteristics when going on vacation! What you, and your friend, DO care about is the location of the hotel, price, activities and cool attractions-so you pick the best examples of those to build your case to travel there.
When you write your resume-and you have some job descriptions in front of you of the positions you’re interested in-why do you throw in information about your experience that doesn’t directly relate to why you’re perfect for this position? Why are your best bits buried toward the bottom of your endless list of bullets? In some cases, the best bits aren’t even on there-it’s only when I interview my clients that I find out the REALLY awesome things they’ve done.
If you were doing the hiring-would you hire you? Is your resume interesting and well-written enough to entice a hiring manager to call you? It’s all about you baiting them into calling you for an interview. Give ‘em what they want.
