Your Resume sucks

I am reading something like 100 resumes and as many LinkedIn Profiles every day. Most of them suck.

They don’t have enough information and they don’t show the real person behind the information. There’s no personal aspect and it makes it really hard to gauge whether or not you are a good fit for my client’s work environment or not. So, I am left to guess at who you are and what you do.

Being a recruiter is as much about finding reasons not to embarrass myself in front of a customer by presenting a poor candidate as it is about presenting the right candidate.

If you’ve worked in Government, you probably are used to stodgy and sterile work environments where everyone just punches the time clock and doesn’t care if they get anything done.

If you’ve worked at a startup, you are used to frenetic and happy environments where people come to work because they love to work.

If you’ve jumped around a lot, it’s because you can’t keep a job or are never satisfied – so I can’t offer your resume to my clients, because they want someone who will stay with them for years not months.

If you have a list of skills, but then don’t explain why those skills were useful or how you used them at your jobs, then it is impossible for me to know whether your skills list is just something you copy/pasted from the internet or you actually happen to be able to perform those skills.

If your resume has spelling errors, I have to assume you have no attention to detail and will be a bad candidate for my client.

If your resume has grammar mistakes, plurality mistakes, or crazy conjunctions and adjectives then I have to assume you can’t communicate well.

Be the right candidate:

Make sure your information is clear

Make sure I know what you did at your last job, in plain english

Make sure your writing is free of spelling and grammar mistakes

Include your skills in your job descriptions as well as your skills list

Include information about what it was that excited you in the job and what challenges you faced

Organize your resume, so that it is clean and easy to read or scan

You should know that most recruiters find resumes through job boards or Google searches. This means that when they get to your resume, it is because of specific keywords they were looking for. Once they have your resume, they are looking for reasons to disqualify you from the job. This is not for any reason other than the fact that they are looking for the perfect at-a-glance match to the job req they have to fill. So, if you don’t stand out for the specific job you want, then you will get passed by very quickly.

Yes, some recruiters will contact every single person who is remotely qualified and hope to get some responses. Then, they will disqualify you if your answers are not what they are looking for.

It’s not personal. It’s a time thing and a reputation thing. Recruiters have to go through hundreds, sometimes thousands of resumes a day to find the purple squirrel (the perfect candidate). They don’t usually have time to talk to every single possible candidate, so they look for a resume that has everything exactly the way they need it. Wrap your resume up in a bow, make it perfect for the job you want, and you will find that you get hired much quicker.

Example:

We built the website with security as a focus and were able to handle 2 million visitors a week.

vs

The website we worked on was built on the Zend MVC Framework utilizing OOPHP, Ajax, jQuery, and the ACL components for user controls and security. We were able to build the site on time by utilizing 3 week sprints in our Agile development process. The combination of MVC development practices and utilizing source control allowed the team to build very clean and scalable code extremely quickly. As well, we were able to unit test every piece of code we produced.

In the first one you said what you did, but the description blows hard. In the second job description, you can see the quality improvement. If a recruiter is looking for Zend, MVC, Agile, and jQuery they are going to throw out the first guy and go after the second guy every single time.

Keep these questions in mind when you read through your resume:

Can someone tell what skills I used in my last job?

Does my resume set me up for the type of job I want to do?

Does my resume show a recruiter what I am capable of?

Is there any of my personality/drive/ability/mental state in my resume?

Is the right message being sent?