Online Job Search and Recruitment Part III — Five Tips for Getting Your Online Resume Noticed
photo credit SOCIALisBETTER via flickr
So Many Resumes, So Little Time
In the late 1990′s, I helped my boss screen candidates for a new position. It was my job to review the resumes and separate them into two piles: “Interview” and “Send Immediate, Polite Rejection Letter.”
With only a few ads in the paper, we received roughly sixty resumes, about seven of which I placed in the “Interview” pile.
If I were performing the same task today, it’s likely I would have three hundred or more resumes to review, thanks to the prevalence of online job boards and the high volume of job seekers.
According to a Forbes article about how to find a job online in this crowded market:
At the Internet job board Jobfox.com, recruiters are getting between 300 and 500 applications on average for each position they advertise. That’s up five times in the last six months. It’s a similar scene at TheLadders.com, where the recruiters say they now receive twice as many applications for each open position as this time last year.
How to Get Your Resume to the Top of the Stack
After reading the Forbes article, I decided to see what other advice is available to help job hunters stand out when using online job boards.
Here are the top five tips to help your resume stand out
- Apply early. Very early.
Think about it. When I was reviewing resumes in the late 90′s, there was at least a three-day delay between placing our help-wanted ad and receiving the first responses. After that, responses came in at the rate of perhaps five or six a day for a week or two. After that period, we still received the occasional resume — but by then we’d already decided whom we wanted to hire.
Today, hiring managers and recruiters can receive dozens or even hundreds of resumes by email or online within minutes of posting an open position. And just as I had other job responsibilities in addition to screening resumes, hiring managers and recruiters have other tasks as well.
This means that the first thing you need to do to get your resume noticed is to apply early — run your job search terms every morning and apply right away — so your resume will be on top of that decision-maker’s online pile!
- Customize your resume and cover letter for each job.
Many companies now process resumes electronically, scanning all the resumes they’ve received into a database and running key word searches for the particular skills, knowledge, and experience they desire.
If you want to get past this computer screening and have an actual human being read your resume, you need to make your best effort to include the keywords the employer will be searching for.
In a Newsweek interview about online job search tips, job search expert Pat Kendall advises: “What I recommend is that a person find two or three of the best postings that match their ideal job. They should then pull the keywords used in those postings and weave them into their own resume.”
Remember, though, that the important point is to weave the keywords into your resume. A resume full of great keywords awkwardly dropped into poorly written and disorganized content may get pulled up in an employer’s search, but risks being discarded by the first person who reads it.
- Limit the positions you apply for.
This advice may sound counterintuitive in today’s economy. However, a person giving your resume a whole 15 seconds of their time (down from roughly 30 seconds when I was hand opening snail-mailed resumes) cares only about whether your specific skills and experience matches the job for which you’re applying.
By focusing your efforts on the smaller number of positions for which you are best suited, rather than taking a shotgun approach, you will avoid much wasted time.
Of course, you may want to change industries or job titles, or perhaps you’ve concluded this is a necessity in the current job market. If so, it’s particularly important to tailor your resume and cover letter to highlight your transferable skills and to use keywords specific to the job and industry you’re pursuing.
- Formatting counts
You must take the time to insure that the resume you send will look as perfect in the hiring manager’s hands — or on their computer monitor — as in your hands and on your monitor.
For an in-depth explanation of the do’s and don’ts of formatting your resume for print, online job sites, and email, see this article on The Riley Guide.
- Follow instructions, and follow up.
If the job posting requires that you send your resume in the body of an email and not as an attachment, do so. Likewise, be sure to follow all of the directions in the job posting. Failure to do so may mean your resume won’t even be seen — and even if it is, will most likely be rejected out of hand.
Also, remember that job boards don’t hire people. People hire people. If the job posting says “No phone calls” (or even if it doesn’t), you can still do a bit of private sleuthing via LinkedIn, the company Web site, and even your friends and family to get direct contact information for either the hiring manager or someone in the company who is close to that person. Online and offline, networking is still the best way to stand out in today’s overcrowded job-seeking crowd.
The Bottom Line: It’s Not the Decision-Maker’s Job to Search You Out. It’s Your Job to Appeal to the Decision-Maker
When I was opening and scanning snail-mailed resumes, I had one objective: get the process over with as quickly as possible while still finding the best person for the job my company was offering. Even with my other responsibilities, though, I did take the time to open each and every resume-containing envelope that came my way. After all, I’d collected them from the mail, so I had at least a mild interest in seeing whether the resume inside qualified for the “Interview” or “Immediate Polite Rejection Letter” pile on my desk.
Today’s recruiters, hiring managers, and their staff have as little vested interest in any particular resume as they do in any of the hundreds of pieces of electronic communication they see every day. With today’s technology and today’s recession, the people who handle resumes are more overwhelmed than ever. If you want to be one of the people who gets called for an interview, it’s your job to make the hiring staff’s job easy.
Following the above tips will save you time and make the lives of recruiters and hiring managers easier — which will help you get the job.
Dawn, this was an excellent post. The picture at the top was interesting too – it’s amazing what lengths people are going to (to get noticed). I’ve seen personal billboards and display ads in the newspaper from job seekers trying to get more visibility.
But you are right about getting noticed. I work in HR and many times it is touch and go. Meaning, with resumes, I touch them (look at and review them) and then either file them or make a call.
It’s tough when you’re getting hundreds of applications for a single job. So your comments were right on.