Bill Vick’s Excellent Reminder of What Resumes Are Really For

Yesterday Bill Vick posted an article titled “Traditional RESUMES Are Worthless” on EmploymentDigest.net.

My first reaction to the title of the post was, well, I have heard this before, and despite trying to use resumes that were not “traditional” with my candidates and clients, the resistance to that change has and continues to be most surprising to me year after year.  Hiring managers just won’t make the switch to resumes that are not traditional, at least not so much here in Midwest.

So, as a third party recruiter/search professional I began Bill’s article with a healthy bit of skepticism, open to see what he was going to share.

It only took a paragraph or two to understand the central point of Bill’s article, which was clearly written for candidates more than for those in our profession.

That said, truth is third party recruiters & search professionals use resumes for essentially the exact same reason candidates do, to arrange interviews between our candidates and our buyer prospects or clients.  With that in mind, I think every recruiter or search professional should review Bill’s article to remember how they should be using resumes as they practice their craft, such gems as:

“…the only reason for a resume is to get an interview.”

“Most people only spend between 10 and 20 seconds on the first screen [page]“

“The fact is every resume is simply a marketing document…”

“Candidates resumes…often assume a one-size-fits-all.”

“For all those wondering, yes this means you may have more than one marketing document (resume).”

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After reading these reminders, most search and placement professionals are probably thinking to themselves, “Yep, know all this.”  But why then do you make resume presentations that fail as marketing documents?

What do I mean specifically?  I see very few recruiters and search professionals who make resume submissions to their buyers that:

• Have a cover page reminding the client why the candidate should be interviewed with a few succinct bullet points…it isn’t good enough to just write your thoughts in an email presentation as that often gets separated from the resume very quickly
• Make sure that candidates don’t have a “Objective” to open their resume, but instead have a “Career Summary” that sells specifically to the job at hand
• Make comments within the resume to highlight resume items that simply cannot be overlooked (we try to do this twice on screen/page one, and at least once on page two…we see few reasons why a resume should ever be longer)
• Include a checked reference or two, also with highlights of the critical points that someone making a decision needs to see

So truth is, despite my thinking that I still use “traditional” resumes in my process, I don’t.

I challenge my buyers with my perspective clearly highlighted as to why they should interview my candidates through the above techniques.  They don’t always take to these practices immediately, but they eventually come to love them.  Why wouldn’t they?  I make it easy for them to see the what and why as to the relevance to my candidate’s relationship to the search they are trying to fill.  It saves them time and actually preps them for interviews effectively with what I point out and highlight through the above.

If a resume’s goal is to get your candidate an interview, do you employ every tactic you have available to aggressively market your candidates to the buyers who are reviewing their resume to decide if they are going to interview your candidate or not?

If not, why not?

Your most important value to your candidates initially, is your skill to bring them to interviews with buyers who are interested and offer appropriate opportunity.  I think too often we fail in that task because we fail to create compelling resume marketing documents for our clients to review, resumes that are intelligent and purposeful marketing documents that compel our clients and prospects to be highly motivated to interview, and THEN hire our candidates.

There is no rule that says you can’t add your thoughts and highlights right into a candidates resume.  In fact the rule for great recruiters is that you can’t afford to send a resume out that doesn’t have these additions to ensure your candidate gets noticed, and gets that interview.  Interviews are the only way we get hires.

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Bill’s article was a nice reminder that can be shared with your candidates so you can work with them to created a resume marketing document, or often set of documents, that will show your candidate just how valuable you are to their search, and make it clear to your buyers that when you present, you are not just passing on resumes with keywords that seem to match, but are carefully selecting candidates that will deliver value with the candidates you feel they should interview and then hire.

Jeff Skrentny, CERS, had an inauspicious start in the recruiting profession as his first placement quit after 93 days.  Then he was sued.  Despite that start, Jeff  has been an executive recruiter for 23 years, and has also been a trainer, author and motivator for his profession for the last 15 years, as well as being a business consultant and adviser for its producers, managers & owners for the last 10 years; all while still running a busy IT search business in Chicago at his firm Jefferson Group Search.