Why you need to delete the Objective Statement:
The Hiring Manager is not there to give you a job! Their task is to attract the best possible human assets to fill job requirements. So, job seekers, they don’t really care what your objective is! The questions you want to answer are:
“What do you bring to the table in terms of hard skills and what experience born of accomplishments can you offer the employer? What are the likely results of hiring you?”
Replace the Objective Statement with a Professional Summary
The Professional Summary is a one or two paragraph snapshot of your qualifications and accomplishments. Not your job history. Not your education. Emphasis on accomplishments.
Always think in terms of quantifying. Anyone can say “excelled at last job” but “successfully hit sales quotas 100% of the time and exceeded goals by 20% in the last 6 months” is much more powerful. Remember, you can even do this if your position doesn’t involve numbers.
Pro Tip – Keyword Phrase
Your Professional Summary is a great place to insert a keyword phrase you have taken from the specific job description so that an ATS scan or a human scan will discover you have exactly what they are looking for.
Pro Tip – Fine Tuning
Your resume should be designed so that you can fine-tune by easily altering one or two sentences in your Professional Summary to include a highly relevant keyword phrase taken from the job description. Do not use “one size fits all” thinking. Before submitting your resume take a few minutes to identify fine-tuning opportunities that you can capitalize on!
Remove Personal Information
Today, a collection of personal information can be HR’s worst nightmare. Modern resumes must be kept professional at all times. Remove marital status, DOB, number of children, hobbies and your street address. Never a photo – the exception: photos are usually required in Europe.
Six Second Scan
Your Resume is NOT a Book
Ignore page restrictions at your peril! Up to five years experience calls for a one page resume; five or more years calls for two pages, three pages max; Federal resumes average between four and six pages.
There are several reasons for this standard. A recruiter or hiring manager looking at a typical stack of perhaps 200+ resumes doesn’t want to read them all. Resumes for the most part, end up being sorted into one of two stacks, either boring/not qualified or scan again because they possess the WOW factor.
Reducing a complex assignment to simple repeatable tasks is a great function of time management. The infamous six second scan practiced by recruiters is widely known. A properly structured resume with information placed where it’s expected can be efficiently scanned in six seconds by most recruiters, for reasons to REJECT your resume.
For example, spending 10 minutes with each of 200 resumes equals 33 hours of reading. Spending 6 seconds with each of 200 resumes and rejecting all but about 5 can be done in as little as 10 minutes. When asked how they felt about long resumes (2+ pages) and clever formats for columns and graphics designed to be eye catching, many recruiters will respond,
“To me it means they want special treatment and they don’t respect my time. If I have to stop and hunt for information or I see dozens of vague comments I routinely throw them away.”
Is it fair? Six seconds may seem like an unfair amount of consideration, but I can assure you that it’s the norm. Thanks to the ease of submitting instant applications on the internet, and unqualified candidates with the attitude of “nothing to lose” today’s recruiters receive an overwhelming number of resumes, 200+ for a single job is not uncommon. A properly structured resume can be evaluated for rejection very quickly and a confusing resume even quicker! The usual goal is 5 or 10 resumes to actually interview.
More Rejection
If you have fancy graphics and eye-catching design, your resume may never know the rejection of a human hiring manager… because if it causes the ATS system to become confused, it may delete your beautiful resume right out of the gate!
The message here is if you are being advised to “write for the human, not the bot” your resume may never have a chance. You must do both!
Resumes that make the “Interview Stack”
Today, that means a clean design in an established font, information where it is expected with appropriate page and content guidelines. The areas for creative license are your Professional Profile, Skills presentation, and injection of keywords and keyword phrases.
The Professional profile needs to pop! That means the requirements the recruiter is scanning against should be where we know they will look – your Professional Profile!
Accomplishments should be carefully woven into your job history in order to score with ATS, and the recruiter or hiring manager while conserving space.
Use Metrics
Especially if you are changing careers, it’s always more important to emphasize accomplishments and results than employers and titles. If your accomplishments and results are less than you would like, instead of listing out your duties, use metrics. For example, instead of “Field Manager – (duties list)” say “Supervised six field reps – resulted in meeting or exceeding goals 100% of the time.”
Your resume can actually pack a more powerful punch than ever before, because power is concentrated in a relatively short space meaning although fewer words, you will find the right phrases and descriptions are accomplishing more and working harder!
File Format
I generally deliver resumes in both PDF and DOCX format and where possible, I would suggest submitting both if you are emailing. If you are uploading, the system should tell you it’s preference, which is usually DOCX. The only exception is if an employer has made a specific request, for example to submit in PDF only or DOCX only.
Pro Tip – file name
Avoid the fog of forgetfulness! Do not save this important document with a random or generic file name like gms123-1.pdf or resume-1.docx. Recruiters see the name of your file and they may save it without changing it. After looking at the next 200 resumes, they may well forget who resume-1.docx actually is. Instead, save your file as FirstName_LastName_Resume.docx
Education
Education only belongs near the top of your resume if you are still in school or recently graduated. Once you have become employed, employers are much more interested in your professional experience and results than knowing you had the perseverance to get thru school.
The degree is not your “get out of jail free” card so don’t act like it is! The exception would be if you are applying for a career position where the level of education is an important and critical requirement.
If you have been out of school for a while, 12 years or more, don’t list graduation and attendance dates in your information, unless you are preparing a Federal resume.
Work History
It is not necessary to list more than 15 yrs of work history. Doing so will take up precious resume and keyword space that could be better utilized under your Professional Profile. Also, there is no point in risking age discrimination. The exception – Federal resumes.
Resume and Cover Letter should sync with each other and with Linkedin.
Your resume should not be uploaded into the About section of your LinkedIn profile. You will be fine tuning your resume and cover letter for each application whereas your LinkedIn profile should be hitting the keywords and keyword phrases across the board in general terms.
References – Don’t Include
Don’t use your precious space by including names and contacts. References available on request are completely fine. Besides that, when an employer asks for references you know you are moving forward and at that time, you can alert your references that a call may be coming.
Pro Tip – Branding
A personal website is a great way to showcase expertise, experience and other assets you may possess without breaking resume protocols. You can include your personal website with your Executive, Professional or Federal resume along with reference to it within your cover letter. If your resume passes the first scan, both ATS and the hiring manager may become interested.
Professionally Written Resumes
Resumes convey who you are, what you are capable of, and if you are the sort of person the employer would love to have on their team. Taken separately, your education, your work experience, and your life accomplishments may NOT be your “ticket to ride!” It is your resume, which brings together one incredible snapshot which becomes your “elevator pitch” on steroids!
Your resume should be up to date and treated as the valuable document it truly is.
One last question: You are lost in a sprawling hospital complex, a high rise campus that has been expanded with various wings and additions over a period of 70 years. It’s an enormous, confusing place. You are late for an administrative interview, but if you call to ask location instructions, you fear looking inept, and besides that, you don’t know where you are at! Do you continue to explore because you are fiercely independent, or do you simply grab an aide who knows the place intimately, and have them take you there?
Getting in front of the right hiring manager can be like racing against time in a critical maze while the right directions are not immediately clear! Leverage your assets by simply asking someone who already knows the maze to draw a map. Then use the map to get there first!
Author’s Note:
If you would like me to write your resume, I can be reached at: [email protected]