Another good article in today’s Globe & Mail about optimizing your resume to get it past those nasty “gatekeepers” (i.e. computers) that pre-screen and pre-qualify candidates before a real person ever sees it. It’s important to have a clean, clear, crisp resume – for sure, no doubt. But it’s equally important that you take the time to review the job spec and ensure that your resume aligns as much as possible with that job. Remember, these days it’s seldom a person reading your resume first – it’s a computer scanning for the right words and phrases.
What to do?
1. Read the job posting, know what the role is, what the responsibilities are and what qualifications are critical for this role. You might want to take the time to list them. Trust me, recruiters are doing this so that they can pre-program their computers to search for what is most important for this role.
2. Look at your resume. While you may like it and you may think it’s great, does it match the requirements for this particular role? If not, redraft it. Ensure your competencies and your experience and your achievements match what’s needed for this role. If analytics is key for this role and is mentioned a thousand times in the posting (I exaggerate), then make sure it appears more than once on your resume.
3. Another good thing to do….ensure that you use both the acronym and the full words to describe what you. If you’re a customer service rep for instance, you might also want to say “CSR”. If there’s more than one way to describe what you do, list both. I always ensure I use ‘talent acquisition’ and ‘recruitment’ to describe what I do. Are they one and the same? Yes. Would a person know that? Probably. Would a computer be programmed to know that? Maybe not. Why take the chance?
Read the full article here and then do a spot-check of your resume today. If you’re applying for roles and not hearing back, this may be the reason why. Of course, nothing beats reaching out to your network and getting in front of the right people!
https://secure.globeadvisor.com/servlet/ArticleNews/story/gam/20140523/RBCACOMPUTERRESUMEPRINTATL
Great advice! I find many apply because they think they’ll eventually get lucky.
That’s probably true. And ‘luck’ really shouldn’t play into it. A good resume, a qualified candidate and perseverance (and networking) is surely the name of the game.