Many of us are on the front lines of recruiting and reviewing talent for our company or clients and dealing with the numbers are not easy. Most work with applicant tracking systems, a the technology platform, to help manage the flow and these help, however when the data from the candidate is formatted in ways that are not easy to deal with they can be overlooked. Yes, these systems do a fine job of uploading data. It’s how the recruiter or hiring authority uses the information that matters. Here are a few tips to consider when formatting your resume:

• Ease of contact: Our contact information needs to be seen and easy to retrieve. Use a word doc or PDF and have all your contact information together so one can easily cut and paste the information into an email. A hiring authority or administrator needs to schedule an interview and they need the contact information with the resume attached. I like to send the contact information in the email so one can quickly see the data and make the call or send the email. It is frustrating when the name, address, phone and email are in separate boxes or have been formatted in a way the makes the simple cut and paste difficult. Check yours and see how easy it is. A simple point but when sorting through the deluge it matters.

• Clean Format: And speaking of copy and paste…Corporate and third party recruiters, at times need to copy and paste your information into a doc with corporate letter head or into a standard format for hiring manager review. When the resume is formatted into boxes, for instance they look great but once copied the good looks fall apart. Personal suggestion, use a straight word doc format or PDF file that it easy to use. I know, many of you and for good reason don’t want people manipulating your resume…understand completely, just know that making it difficult may slow the process that may have led to a timely call…have seen it happen more than once.

• Easy to read: There are more resumes styles than we know how to deal with and because people are reading people’s work it makes sense that multiple styles satisfy the market. The simple point, please remember to make your content  easy to read. And you don’t have to check with an expert. Next time you’re at the coffee shop ask the person sitting you don’t know next to you for help. Let them read and react to your resume / CV / profile and be willing to listen.

And hey, your new ‘friend’ may very well be the channel to a new opportunity. As a matter of fact, it may be worth asking everyone there for the help and input….guarantee it won’t hurt.

Three Useful Tips To Format Your Resume is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Tips To Define Your Resume Story
2. The Resume/Profile/CV Tsunami – Hit by the Talent Wave
3. Try A Human Voice In Your Resume

Of course they told you that! They are amoebae – it’s their job to make that speech. They have their priorities, and those priorities have everything to do with bureaucratic practices designed to keep job-seekers coloring inside the lines. Luckily, the hiring manager has other concerns. The hiring manager is the person we need to reach. The black hole and its amoeba tenders are not our friends.

The hiring manager has pain. If he or she did not have some kind of pain, there would be no job. Our job is to spot the pain, and address it in a pithy Pain Letter that will go with our resume directly to the hiring manager’s desk. If we can spot the pain and speak to it, we can get that hiring manager’s attention. Not every hiring manager has the budget to hire us, either as a W-2 employee or a consultant. Those opportunities, unfortunately, may be unavailable to us for financial reasons. But if the particular pain we solve is keeping the hiring manager awake at night, and driving him crazy by day, we may be able to convince that hiring manager to create a job opening where none existed, just yesterday. Thus, we can send a targeted Pain Letter to any decision-maker whose pain is likely to be related to our expertise. We don’t need to respond only to posted job openings. We can reach out to hiring managers who don’t have jobs posted, as well.

Here’s a Pain Letter story to illustrate the process…

Caroline had been a bookkeeper for ten years and the president of her homeowner’s association for five years when she began her job search. Caroline was based in Atlanta. We decided to build on her bookkeeping background and the valuable HOA stint by creating a property management resume and pursuing commercial property management jobs. Caroline hadn’t held a paid property management role at that point — and so what? We wrote the property management resume, emphasizing Caroline’s most relevant accomplishments. We made a list of commercial property owners who might need her help.  For each firm, we dug around to find the name of the most likely hiring manager. We didn’t bother looking at job ads. We knew that any job ads we might spot at these enormous national firms would only direct us into a deadly black hole. We found the head honcho’s name for each company, and wrote to him or her directly.

For one large firm, we couldn’t find the names of any Atlanta managers, but we could see the names and bios of each of the firm’s top execs, right on the organization’s website. We wrote a Pain Letter to the COO of the firm (using the logic that the COO is less likely than the CEO to have an admin standing by ready to toss all unsolicited correspondence) and sent it to him via snail mail with Caroline’s property management resume. About a week after that letter was mailed, Caroline got a phone call from the company’s regional VP in Atlanta.

“I’d like you to come for an interview,” he said, and off Caroline went. When she got to the interview, she saw her Pain Letter and resume, folded in thirds, sitting on the VP’s desk. The COO in New York must have shipped it off to the Atlanta fellow through the inter-office mail system. Caroline had her interview, and she got the offer. Until that moment, she hadn’t had one second of official property management experience. What got her over that substantial credentialing hump?

It was Caroline’s Pain Letter that did the trick. She didn’t write the typical boring, boilerplate cover letter to tell the COO and his VP all about her accomplishments. She figured that those guys get dozens of those letters every day. Instead, she wrote a letter that talked about them. She talked about the company’s news (she found it on their own website) and made an educated guess about their property management pain. It wasn’t hard to guess what that pain might be. Their company is growing, and commercial tenants are hard to find and keep. They’ve got to be kept happy, and a diligent property manager keeps tenants happy by working proactively to make sure their needs are met. A good property manager looks out over the horizon to stop any signs of trouble and stamp them out before they can do damage. Caroline talked about the business pain she imagined this company to have, and her own relevant (and specific!) experience slaying the very same dragon in other assignments. She sent her super-targeted Pain Letter along with her super-targeted resume directly to the guy with the pain, and wasted no time nor words talking about all the other fabulous, unrelated things she’s done.

There may well be a property management certification. Caroline doesn’t have that certification, if there is one. So what? She came prepared to talk about the issue at hand. She got the job, and here’s the best part: she had no competition, because there was no job posted. We can use Pain Letters and targeted resumes to reach decision-makers when there’s no job posted, and when there is one.

In my job search approach, the important points to remember are:

• Write to the decision-maker directly, not to the black hole address or to HR. Use LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and the employer’s own website to find that decision-maker.
• Write a Pain Letter that talks more about them than about you. Speak directly to the decision-making manager in a conversational tone. Make an educated guess about the business pain the employer is facing. (Next week in this space, we’ll share a Pain Letter example.)
• Use one concrete, highly relevant example to illustrate your past success solving a nearly identical variety of business pain — a la “I slew that same type of dragon last year in Romania.”
• Keep your Pain Letter short and simple. Don’t veer off into a litany of your skills and accolades. End with a simple call to action, e.g. “I’d love to talk when your schedule allows.”
• If you are writing a Pain Letter to a decision-maker in response to a posted job ad, remember to keep your focus on the pain — NOT on the list of requirements specified in the job ad. That list of requirements is trivial — the belief that you can solve the decision-maker’s pain is not.
• Send your Pain Letter with your highly-targeted resume (not the generic resume you send out in response to every job ad you see – you’re going to burn that thing and never, ever use it again). A snail mail letter to the decision-maker’s desk is the best choice if you can’t find a personal connection. If you can — via your 3-D network or LinkedIn – use that trusted-colleague avenue first, of course.

We cannot always locate ‘our’ hiring manager’s name. In an enormous organization like IBM, it may be nearly impossible to do that. For organizations of about 10,000 employees and fewer, we have a decent chance of locating ‘our’ decision-maker, and for organizations of 1,000 employees and fewer, it should be a slam-dunk exercise that takes about five minutes. More on that topic — finding the decision-maker — along with a sample Pain Letter in next week’s blog post. The big message for this week: no more resumes wasted in the black hole!

How To Circumvent The Resume Black Hole is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Who’s Got Your Resume — A Decision-Maker Or An Amoeba?
2. Try A Human Voice In Your Resume
3. Three Useful Tips To Format Your Resume

• Act 1 is the story of the protagonist.
• Act 2 is the story of the barriers/challenges.
• Act 3 is the story of the achievement of the goal.

For the past two weeks we have been exploring how you can get the best attention by being able to tell the “story of you” in the most compelling and unique way so that an interviewer/recruiter walks away with her/his own story to tell about you. As a long time talent recruiter the ones who got the job were the ones where I could sit with a hiring manager and say, “you gotta hear the story of this person.”  If I was excited about telling their story to someone else the chances of their getting hired went up exponentially.

Last week we discussed six mini-plots about you that you should have prepared and are ready to go.  Have you gotten those down on a piece of paper yet?  If not, take the time to do so.  Once that is done, then you can wrap those together to create you as the protagonist in the story of your career and you.  What makes a protagonist interesting is that we gain just enough detail that offers insights into that person’s history or motivation.

When you think about how you describe yourself when asked, what are those elements of you that are unique and interesting that have propelled your career and the decisions you have made to this point?  I typically cringe when I hear, “I was born….”, but many times there is something right there that is the catalyst that creates the story arc of someone very interesting. Without doubt, my interests, goals and overall career have been significantly shaped by the fact that my Father was a radio disc jockey when I was born and did radio, TV and theater while I was growing up.  And because, at least at one time, radio and TV people were interesting and intriguing to most people, I have always been able to catch the interest of an interviewer by starting the story of me with “I was born with a Father who was a radio and television personality”.  Everyone has their own unique traits that can set a story in motion. Think about yours.  Find those unique details that when you string them together give someone else a good picture of who you are and what makes up you. If you need help here, go back through your six mini-plots from last week and make a list of the five to 10 unique attributes of you and start working with that list to create the character that is you.

Some other traits you might want to consider in the ‘Story of You’ include:

• Overachiever
• Ambitious
• Athletic
• Well-educated
• Unique family
• Dreamer
• Entrepreneurial
• Gifted
• Listener
• Reader
• Outgoing
• Driven

Whatever the traits are that make up you, figure out what makes you the protagonist in the ‘Story of You’ and find a way to express them in a unique and interesting way that gives the listener just enough detail to catch their attention and  set the story of you into motion.

Next week, we’ll discuss Act II – the Barriers in telling the ‘Story of You’.

Be The Hero In The Career ‘Story of You’ During An Interview: Part 3 – Act I is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Tips To Define Your Resume Story
2. How To Tell The ‘Story of You’ In A Job Interview: Part 2 – Plots
3. How to Tell the ‘Story of You’ in A Job Interview: Part 1

Based on the company and interview reviews on Glassdoor, we did some digging around to give you a better picture of what it’s really like to be a recruiter today.

What recruiters don’t like about their jobs: In a nutshell, being a recruiter requires long hours, sometimes a low commission based salary, and a continual uphill climb given a tough job market.

Long hours, commission brackets are impossible to reach, once you reach then you still aren’t making that much money. – Aerotek Recruiter

Overall, the staffing industry isn’t a prime place to be. Go in wanting to learn about the job market and what you need to succeed, and get out while you can. – Aerotek Recruiter

You will not have a personal life. – Spherion Recruiter

There isn’t much of a work-life balance, my average week as about 60 hours, and that was nothing compared to some of my colleagues. – Robert Half Recruiting Manager

In a down economy it’s about numbers vs. the past or the quality of the individual. – Kforce Account Manager/Recruiter

What recruiters do like about their jobs: On the plus side, recruiters enjoy getting to see firsthand the fruits of their labor, and some report that the more elbow grease you put into it the more you will get out of your career in recruiting.

You get to see the result of your hard work. There is nothing better than seeing a person get a position they really wanted and having them thank you for it. – Aerotek Recruiter

This job is exactly what you make of it. They reward hard work and integrity with chances to increase your load and advance. – Spherion Recruiter

Excellent opportunity to make money when the economy is doing well. The ability to earn commissions as a sales person there are excellent. – Robert Half Recruiting Manager

You are paid for your performance and income potential is unlimited. –  Robert Half Recruiting Manager

Provides an insight into large corporations hiring practices or the lack there of. You can earn a decent entry level paycheck with a bachelors degree in social science or even liberal arts. – Volt Information Technical Recruiter

And last, but not least, what is it like to get a job as a recruiter or at a staffing agency in this market? What do recruiters get asked in an interview?

What does diversity mean to you? – TEKsystems Technical Recruiter

There is a man on the ground with a broken window and a rock in the same room. What happened? – Microsoft Recruiter

Tell me about a former colleague you didn’t get along with. – Apple Recruiter

What would you do if you got a job at a company and you hated it? – AeroTek Recruiter

Remember that this snapshot is just the tip of the iceberg for the recruiter and staffing agencies reviews on Glassdoor. If you have questions on how to determine if a recruiting job at a specific company is right for you, contact Glassdoor’s Clearview Collection, a panel of career experts with expertise in recruiting, HR and other workplace issues, with your questions (askclearview@glassdoor.com). Or, if you are looking to work with a recruiter and staffing agency, take some advice from Glassdoor career expert Jeff Hunter who offers tips on how to evaluate a job and career recruiter.

Job Recruiters Dish On What They Like About Their Careers, What They Don’t, And What They Get Asked In An Interview is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Attention All In-House Recruiters: Extra Grace Required
2. Don’t Let Your Ego Ruin Your Interview
3. They asked you what during the interview?!?

Anyone who has worked as a recruiter knows the horror stories. You find the perfect candidate. They have an amazing portfolio of work, outstanding references and are great during the interview. It’s a slam dunk. All that’s left is negotiating the offer.

And then disaster strikes. Maybe someone said something during an interview like: “You are our top candidate” or “I can’t imagine the hiring manager not putting you at the top of her list.” Somehow, someway, the candidate becomes overly confident that the job is locked in. They move from guiding the process to believing they can control it. The perfect candidate is now the perfect nightmare.

Usually it starts with the candidate making scheduling demands. Next comes the dismissive emails, the constant reminders about other offers, the number of recommendations on LinkedIn and all the other options they are considering. The next thing you know the recruiter is making it their life mission to figure out how to get this “perfect” candidate on the reject list

We all know that it is far more common for a recruiter to be rude to a candidate than the other way around. That bad behavior usually happens because the recruiter is overly confident that they are controlling the recruiting process and can afford to make the candidate dance to their tune.

That’s inexcusable and something that every recruiting leader needs to fix as fast as possible. But this blog has been about how to make you brand talent. You need to be in control of your career, not waiting around for overworked recruiters, overfilled job boards and distracted hiring managers to help you find the job of your dreams.

But once you get that desperate call, once you nail that interview and feel on top of the world, don’t make the same mistake as a bad recruiter. No matter how good you are you can’t afford to be uncivil, demanding, petulant or overbearing. Remember, recruiters and hiring managers are people too, with egos and expectations. They expect to be treated well, just as you do. If you want the job you want them on your side.

Don’t Let Your Ego Ruin Your Interview is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. What Is the Job Search Velvet Rope?
2. How To Evaluate A Job & Career Recruiter
3. Active Job Seekers Beware; Get Screened In Before Your Next Job Search

I hate that black hole, because it doesn’t help candidates get jobs, and it doesn’t help employers hire good people either. The black hole chews up and swallows resumes, letting only a tiny number squeak through to a hiring manager. The resumes that get through the black hole aren’t necessarily attached to the smartest or most capable job-seekers, sad to say. They’re just the resumes of people whose backgrounds happen to match the job spec the most closely.

Plenty of talented candidates will notice a gaping black hole at the front of a corporate recruiting process, and keep on walking.  Life is too short to spend it pitching resumes into the void. Job seekers with better options are going to find them, leaving the corporate black holes to less-sought-after candidates.

Screening resumes against keywords or a long list of requirements is a horrible way to hire good people. How much hubris does it take to imagine that the best-qualified person for an open position — the person who can help a business the most, by dint of passion, creativity, brains and curiosity – is going to be the person who perfectly fits all of the trivial job requirements, certifications and penny-ante specifications detailed in a job ad?

Now, let’s think about the person reading your resume, on the far side of that black hole. Sometimes the resume-screener is a person who runs the keyword-searching mechanism the black hole relies on. Sometimes it’s a person who actually views the text of the resume you trustingly pitched into the abyss. Either way, it is wise for us to think a bit about this person. Is he or she someone like you — broad-minded, worldly, lively and fun? Maybe s/he is all those things, when s/he’s at home or out on the town with friends.  On the clock, I doubt that the person reviewing your resume right now is the slightest bit broad-minded, worldly, lively or fun. In fact, I would be very surprised if the resume-screener could be characterized as having any of those qualities, when s/he’s pouring over resumes.

Typically the person on the receiving end of the black hole is given a copy of the job spec, and told “Make two piles. One pile will include all the resumes that don’t meet the job spec. The other pile — a really short pile — will include the few resumes that match the job spec to a tee.”

Mind you, the resume-screener isn’t told: “Now, when we say ‘meets the job spec’ we don’t mean that the candidate has to match the job requisition entirely. Be creative, as you review these resumes. Look for the quality of the writing in the cover letters, and try to gauge the candidate’s intellectual curiosity and pluck from his or her resume and career progression. Lean in favor of risk-takers and people who’ve made quirky twists and turns in their careers. Give us the most warm-blooded, fearless job-seekers you can find in the bunch.”

Typically, the resume-screener’s instructions are just the opposite.

“We’ve got twelve criteria for this job, so don’t pass through any resumes that don’t mean all twelve of them!” Weird job titles, short-term jobs, employment gaps and more than two years of work history outside our industry are grounds for immediate no-thanks-ification.

I encourage job-seekers to think about resume-screeners as amoebae — those single-celled creatures we used to view under microscopes back in high school.  Amoebae don’t have a lot of high-level thought processes. To an amoeba, anything in the environment — including you, Mr. or Ms. Job-Seeker — looks like either predator or prey.

If your resume pops out of the black hole meeting all of the twelve picky criteria listed on the job spec, you might look like prey. That’s in your favor. The rest of us look like predators. We scare the heck out of the amoeba in the resume-reviewing position. Passing our resume on to the hiring manager could get the amoeba in trouble. If we have a really scary — I mean confident, human and unusual — resume, we may terrify the poor amoeba. If we do that, we have zero chance of making it through the amoeba-screen to chat or meet with a hiring manager.

Most of us cannot win against the amoeba. Our resume will be tossed in the circular file. If we don’t look on paper like we were genetically engineered to suit this job, we’re toast.

That’s why a big part of our job-search mission is to avoid the black hole — and the amoebae who live behind it — at all costs.

How do we skirt the black hole, leave the amoebae to their work tossing other people’s resumes into the trash bin, and reach hiring managers directly? Read the blog post in this space next week. In my post on Wednesday 11/18/09, I’ll explain how to get your resume into a decision-maker’s hands, avoid the black hole and speak to your future boss directly about the issues that he or she most cares about.

Who’s Got Your Resume — A Decision-Maker Or An Amoeba? is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. How To Circumvent The Resume Black Hole
2. Try A Human Voice In Your Resume
3. The Job-Seeker’s Secret Weapon: It’s Pointed

• The “nature of your challenge” story – Can you articulate what the challenge is that you are trying to overcome?  People want to help each other, but they can’t and won’t unless they can identify with the challenge of others.

• The “where you started” story – Are you comfortable talking about the core of who you are and where you started as it relates to what makes you up today?

• The “emblematic success” story  - Do you have the two to three successes cataloged that emphasize and bring out what makes you uniquely successful?

• The “your performance” story -  Can you point to and talk about your performance in an objective way that expresses clearly your values and principles for not only what you can do, but how you do it?

• The “striving to learn and improve” story - Can you express how you learn from your mistakes and successes and what you are doing to continuously improve?

• The “where you are going” story – Can you describe what you want to do, where you want to be in the future, and when you want to get there?  Everyone has a dream, but I am always so surprised with how few people can describe and tell the story of their dreams.

Within the next week, take the mini-stories/plots for you and see if you can write them down as if you were telling them to me or someone else. Don’t worry about how long they are right now, just get them down on a piece of paper.  Next week, we will start to work with the structure of the three acts of a story and begin scripting your own story to tell.

How To Tell The ‘Story of You’ In A Job Interview: Part 2 – Plots is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. How to Tell the ‘Story of You’ in A Job Interview: Part 1
2. Be The Hero In The Career ‘Story of You’ During An Interview: Part 3 – Act I
3. Tips To Define Your Resume Story

Let’s put you in control not just of your career, but of the whole process. You are ruler for a day, and your wishes become other people’s commands. You are sick and tired of the way that the recruiting process treats you. No longer. You are determined to fix it. Luckily you have a great partner in Glassdoor, who is here to learn from you and share your insights and experiences with others. Tell us what you want to change, and how you want to change it:

Finding an Opportunity: Reading the Glassdoor interview pages I see that many of you learn about an opportunity through the Web. Some of you like that, some of you don’t. Now that you are ruler, you can tell us the best way to learn about opportunities that are a good fit for your interests and capabilities. And remember, as ruler you can ask for pretty much whatever you want, so think big and ask for the impossible.

Connecting with the Company: Nothing bothers a ruler more than being treated without respect. Before you were top banana you submitted resumes into an email or web vortex that consumed your hope along with your information. No longer: it’s payback time baby! You’re the big cheese, the grand kahuna. Make a decree about how all the companies under your benevolent reign should receive your expression of interest.

Response: The power is going to your head. You realize that this all-powerful despot thing has its advantages. You decide to put the most force and effort into proclaiming how companies should interact with candidates. No more of this “Don’t call us, we’ll call you!” baloney. Your subjects are people too, and they deserve the respect and care that you do. Auto-response emails? Off with their heads! Tell us how a company should communicate.

Interviewing: After the heady days of fixing the first three problems, you start to come down a little. Interviews are tough. Sometimes you like being challenged in an interview, other times you think the tough questions are a stupid waste of your time. Glassdoor’s interview site provides examples of the different approaches and styles that your subjects like. Now is the time to earn the crown:  How can a company ensure that you are the right fit AND AT THE SAME TIME have the process be rewarding and valuable for you too?

We, your humble servants, look forward to learning from you, the all powerful recruiting ruler. Please submit your demands in the comments section, and I will respond.

Be A Ruler For A Day: First Job – Fix Recruiting! is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. The Truth Behind Recruiting & Finding ‘Brand Talent’
2. Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate
3. Don’t Let Your Ego Ruin Your Interview

It’s easy to see why we’d write a resume in the conventional way, following what I call the ‘Standard Model’. It’s a safe approach, because we’ve already seen a million resumes that read the same way. Here’s an example of a Standard Model resume summary used by one imaginary fellow applying for HR jobs:

Results-oriented HR professional with a bottom-line orientation and strong attention to detail. Team player with excellent communication and organizational skills and experience leading cross-functional teams.

We have read these words ten million times before. When we read them, we get no sense of the person behind the boilerplate language. Is this person creative? Is he smart? We have no idea. The words present a brick wall to the reader. They’re robot words, churned out of the resume-language machine in the sky. We can’t tell whether the resume’s owner is someone who can help us, or someone we’d like to work with every day. We can’t tell anything about him at all. In my opinion, a boilerplate-filled resume is a waste of space.

We can make our resumes more powerful by dropping the boilerplate language in favor of simple, human words that regular people use when they’re not writing resumes. We can write our resume in a human voice that speaks directly to the reader.

Let’s start with the opening words of our resume summary. “Results-oriented professional” is written in a strange kind of governmental/bureaucratic language that has no ‘person’ in it. We know that the phrase “Sally is a sweet girl” refers to Sally in the third person. “I’m left-handed” is written in the first person. What person is used by resume-writers? None at all. ”Results-oriented professional” is neither first-person nor third person. It’s a ghostly kind of no-subject language. Let’s get rid of it, and speak to the reader in the first-person in our resume summary, like this:

As an RA in college and ever since, I’ve loved untangling thorny people problems and helping groups move past differences to beat their goals. I’m an HR Generalist whose strong suit is removing obstacles for the teams I support – from comp snarls and policy confusion to training gaps – and whose passion is building a culture to attract and hang onto the most talented people in our industry.

Now we have a sense of the guy behind the resume – a strong sense of him, in fact. There are zillions of HR people on the job market, but this man knows who he is. He’s an HR guy who loves the employee-relations/generalist side of the HR function. The first-person voice in his resume speaks directly to the reader, and it’s confident. On top of that, this fellow knows what he wants to do and what he’s good at. He is speaking very specifically about his talents without detailing his skills (comp, benefits, HRIS, training) out of context in the usual boring, laundry-list approach.

One more thing — our HR job seeker uses vernacular in his resume summary (slang, in other words). He writes the way he speaks. He says that he’s passionate about helping his employers hang onto talented people, because ‘hang onto’ is the way regular people refer to what HR types call employee retention. This job seeker doesn’t need to use ‘the official words’ in order to feel, or to make himself sound, more professional. He’s professional – he knows it, and it comes through in his description of the work he’s already done. He uses simple English, slangy terms (’beat their goals,” “strong suit”) because it’s a more down-to-earth and confident approach than the Standard Model treatment, a la “Proven track record of success retaining seasoned talent using cross-functional yada yada yada.”

Is the human-voiced approach ten million times stronger than the boilerplate resume summary above? I think so. Most employers – most hiring managers, in particular – will have a strong, positive reaction to a resume summary like this – but not all of them.

Could a more traditional hiring manager or HR person reviewing this HR person’s resume freak out at the use of the first person, the strong branding, and the casual tone? It’s possible. If our HR job seeker’s use of simple human language would get this job seeker tossed out of the promising candidate pile, would he want to work for that company anyway? That’s a question for him or her – and for you.

Try A Human Voice In Your Resume is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. How to Replace Deadly Resume Phrases
2. Ten Deadliest Resume Phrases
3. Tips To Define Your Resume Story

We have been talking about ways for you to take control of your career, to make sure that you are in the driver’s seat when the email or call comes from a recruiter. But what happens when that first contact actually happens? How can you make sure that this call is actually worth your time? Do you really want to be behind the velvet rope at this particular event?

Every recruiter approaches that first contact differently. Of course we are all looking for relevant qualifications. But experienced recruiters know that experience and education aren’t usually all they are cracked up to be. As we have discussed, the world of work is changing fast. Talking about what you learned 20 years ago at college isn’t quite the hook that it used to be.

Good recruiters avoid the “tell me about yourself” knee-jerk exploratory party-starter questions. They know that time (yours and theirs) is their most limited resource. They want to figure out quickly whether you are worth their time. But don’t forget: you are in control. Your time is even more valuable than theirs. Hanging out on a phone call with a bad recruiter who is wasting your time is like going to the dentist without the fun. You need to be able to evaluate the recruiter, just like they are evaluating you.

Here are four areas a good recruiter will try to explore in the initial conversation. Turn-about is fair play.

1. Business Focus: The recruiter needs to quickly determine whether you get ‘how to’ add value to a business, regardless of the type of job. Recruiters are decreasingly interested in a narrowly-focused specialist as it is easier to outsource and automate those kinds of jobs. A good recruiter will be able to tell you how the job they are pitching relates to the success of their business. A good candidate can talk about what kinds of businesses excite them and how they have added value in the past.
2. Problem Solving: Hiring managers are starting to figure out that no matter how well they plan, s*&t happens. Positions that don’t require good problem solving skills are most likely going to lower cost locations (see a pattern here?). A good recruiter knows how to tell you what kinds of problems this job will likely face and why solving those kinds of problems is important to the business. A good candidate can talk about specific problems they have solved in the past and what those examples demonstrate about the value and importance of their capabilities.
3. Agility: If there is one thing that is going to be important in any job that stays local, it is going to be agility. Some call this flexibility or adaptability. It all comes down to the same thing: ability to shift gears rapidly, to respond to change gracefully and actually take advantage of the new situation. If a recruiter tells you that this job is stable, challenge them. A stable job can be easily outsourced.  If the recruiter is pitching security they probably don’t know what they are talking about (and are therefore wasting your time). Be prepared to talk about how you react to change and have used it to your advantage in the past.
4. Purpose: We have discussed this at length. Be prepared to answer the lotto question: “If you won the lottery tomorrow, what would you do?” As we have discussed, a good recruiter knows that the specifics of a job can change from day-to-day but that the long-term objectives of the business are likely to stay the same. They need to be able to tell you about what is really important to the business and the management (the “business purpose”). Similarly, you need to apply the lessons we have talked about previously and be able to determine whether the job being discussed is something that is part of your purpose, and not just another way to turn you into a zombie.

Final advice: get to the point, and demand the recruiter do the same. You really don’t want to be getting phone calls, emails and offers from a company that runs a business you are not interested in, can’t tell you what problems you would be expected to solve, isn’t honest about the importance of change, and doesn’t align to your core purpose. You certainly get enough spam already. Put yourself in the driver’s seat, be ready to answer these questions, and be ready to show the recruiter why they should be working for you.

How To Evaluate A Job & Career Recruiter is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

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3. Don’t Let Your Ego Ruin Your Interview