Doubt often comes to the forefront when the job search takes longer than you would like. Are the jobs in your industry and at your level on the decline? Can you still capture the salary you’re used to? Are your accomplishments as impressive as the next person’s? These points, and more, are all worthy of consideration. However, let’s start with an element you can actually control: your resume.
Too often candidates wait until the job search has lagged for months or even a year or more before it finally occurs to take a look at the quality of the resume. If you’re applying for jobs you know perfectly well you’re qualified to perform, but you’re not receiving the response you need after an extended period of time, consider changing the documents you’re using. Here are ten clues that your resume is slowing down your job search:
Clue #10: Your Resume Came From A Microsoft Word Template: No, no, 1,000 times: no! Particularly for candidates at the $100K+ salary level, building your resume from a template that 500 other candidates for every single job every single day are using is the surest way to stagnate your job search.
Clue #9: You “Spruced Up” The Resume You Used 8 Years Ago: Resume styles, formats, and approaches change every year. There is no such concept as dusting off the same document you used in the past. Not only does it look ancient, but tacking the newest job or two to the top of the resume just looks like a mismatch.
Clue #8: The First Words On The Resume Are “Results-Oriented”: Once again, this is the exact phrase that 500 of your competitors are using. Language like this fails to differentiate who you are and what you bring to the table.
Clue #7: You Claim To Be “Strategic” But There’s No Actual Strategy: Keywording the resume is an important step. However, over-keywording the resume is a mistake. Over-keywording means stuffing the resume with terms that look good on paper, yet there’s no substance if the reader wants to dig deeper.
Clue #6: Your Experience Describes Jobs, Not You: It’s fairly easy to surmise what is entailed across a wide range of job titles. Skip the minutiae, and instead spend the time and space on your resume not to describe the position, but to illustrate your performance in the role.
Clue #5: Several Dozen Bullets Run Down The Left Margin: This is the most over-used format, and it makes the resume look boring. Bullets are for emphasis, yet if you emphasize line after line of the resume, what that really means is you’re emphasizing everything and, therefore, nothing at the same time.
Clue #4: There’s No Hyperlink To Contact You: Your email address should be a hyperlink, plain and simple. This small move automatically makes it seem like you’re knowledgeable regarding basic email communications in the 21st century. Without that, it makes the reader have to go through an extra step to contact you, thereby slowing down your job search.
Clue #3: No One Knows Exactly What It Is You Do: Right out of the gate, in the first 15 seconds, your resume needs to say what you do, what you specialize in, or what your core competency is. Too many adjectives and too much fluff, particularly at the beginning, will send your resume straight to the trash pile.
Clue #2: Employers Consistently Offer Lower Positions Than You Want: If your aiming for an executive position in, for example, Information Technology, but the response you get is consistently for System Administrator roles, there’s a disconnect between what you want to say and what your resume actually tells the audience.
Clue #1: You Call Backs Are Zero, Few, Or Far Between: Bottom line: if you put forth a resume that quantifiably, compellingly, passionately expresses solid experience, there’s no reason not to get a response in a reasonable amount of time.