Is Your Resume Getting Read?
Author: Dalton Hooper When we are writing our resumes, we naturally pour our heart and soul into the verbiage, trying to mention all we have ever done in our work life that might possibly be relevant to the position we are seeking. We heard somewhere that our resume shouldn’t go beyond two pages — three being the absolute maximum; but we just can’t seem to get it all squeezed in and keep the page total where it should be. So, we start reducing the font size, reducing space between paragraphs, eliminating bulleted lists and replacing them with comma-delimited paragraphs. We finally get it all in, but we have a resume with nine-point type and practically no white space. Success? Not really.
It is far better to submit a resume with a minimal amount of information, that will be read, than to submit a resume with a lot of information, that isn’t read at all. Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. You have advertised a job opening in your organization and have received a large number of resumes, as a result. You finally are able to set aside some time in your schedule to review the resumes and determine which candidates you want to call in for interviews. The first thing you do is to perform a kind of “triage”, where you sort the resumes into different piles. One pile is for those that look the most promising. Another pile is for those that you will review IF nothing in the first pile pans out. The third pile is for those resumes that you do not wish to consider unless all the resumes in the other two piles don’t yield a good candidate.
As one of the candidates submitting a resume, it is your mission to entice the hiring manager to place your resume in the first pile. How do you do that? While there are certainly no guarantees, I will reveal to you (having been a long-time hiring manager myself) that the triage decisions are made, based not on the content in the resumes, but on the hiring manager’s first impressions of the resumes.
It is an extremely rare hiring manager who will read each resume completely before making triage decisions about them. So, ask yourself, what IS the first thing that the hiring manager sees when picking up your resume?
The layout!
Frankly, if the first impression is, that the resume isn’t written in a way that makes it easy to scan, it will go into pile #3. After all, if the hiring manager has other resumes that don’t look like they would be drudgery to read, why should they ever read yours? The answer is — they won’t — unless all the others don’t work out.
Keep in mind that the hiring manager is just like any other harried, overworked manager, and will gravitate toward the “low hanging fruit” (i.e., the resume with lots of white space, bullet points, and 12-point type) first.
Be kind to your hiring manager. Good luck!
About the Author:Dalton Hooper is the founder and president of Words and Wit, LLC. Dalton’s latest venture is the writing of his second book, "It's Not Leadership If No One Is Following: The Eight Key Behaviors That Make You The Leader You Ought To Be." Publication is scheduled for late 2009.Dalton’s first book, "Why Is A Microphone Like A Breath Mint? and Nine Other Riddles To Make You A Better Public Speaker", is currently meeting with excellent reviews among novice and veteran public speakers alike.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/resumes-articles/is-your-resume-getting-read-1130100.html