Carl Bradford

Posts Tagged ‘Functional Resumes’

Maybe you’re in this story, or one just like it.

It was 8:30 AM as Julie the Sr. Recruiter got her first copy of coffee and sat down to begin her day.

Julie had just opend three new jobs the night before and got them posted on the Internet before leaving for the day.  Now, she was anxious to see how many new resume responses were already in her in-box, but before she could get to that, she clicked over to her calendar for the day.

Looks like she had about 30 minutes before her first phone interview and then three more before 11 AM.  After that she was scheduled to meet with Bill the VP of Engineering to discuss a series of new job vacancies he was about to open.  Next she had a working lunch planned with the Director of Talent Management.

For the afternoon, three more phone interviews and one in-person interview.

Now for the in-box of resumes – your resume is among them because you applied last night. You’re excited about the prospects of this job opportunity, it looks like a great match and with a company you’d really like to work for.  You plan to give this employer a couple of days before you follow-up, just to be sure they have time to read your resume.

Now back to Julie.

After the calendar check she opens her in-box – oops three internal emails that are urgent, so these will take priority.  Whew, now that’s out of the way, on to reviewing the resumes.

Before Julie begins working down through the stack of resumes she glances at her watch…darn, only 15 minutes available for that first phone interview.  Determined, she begins to review the resumes faster and faster trying to get through as many as possible before 9 am.

After another 7 minutes, and she finally comes to your resume.  She opens it and begins a quick glance at the top half of your resume.  She notes which job you applied for and immediately within her head a pre-recorded message begins playing.  That message is the criteria she will use to quickly move your resume into the Yes or No stack.  You’ve got no more than 30 seconds to connect with the message playing inside her head.

Twenty seconds into your resume and she quickly moves it into the No stack and opens the next resume.

What went wrong?  Based on the job posting you know it’s a close match.

It’s a resume failure.  Your resume didn’t connect with the message playing inside Julie’s head.  The clues for what your resume needed to communicate were available, but you didn’t pick up on them or maybe you just didn’t know where to find them.  Your resume – which is your marketing brochure when you’re not there in person to fill in the gaps – failed.

You’ve fallen victim to the single biggest reason that candidates don’t get invited into the interview process.

Don’t let this story be yours.  Learn how to connect with the message inside the reader’s head.  Unfortunately this story happens all day long, every day and it doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s also unfortunate that recruiters are stretched just this thin in most companies these days.  That means your resume has to be great – not just good!

Go to Essential Resume Strategies for 15 FREE resume videos that help you create a resume that vastly increases the odds for you to get an interview.

It happened just as I said it would.  He didn’t believe me at first, but after this experience he changed his mind.

I told my candidate his resume was a show stopper.  In other words, I told him to expect a “no interest” from my client if we moved forward with a functional resume.  I couldn’t convince him to change to a chronological resume format and usually I elect not to even proceed, but in this case I wanted to prove a point as well as continue my testing of whether functional resumes get more rejections that the preferred chronological resume.

My tests have generally resulted in a 400% greater rejection rate for functional resumes.  Not odds you want to face if you’re a serious job seeker.

Within two hours of sending his functional resume to my client, I received a short and pretty blunt email.  The email read in part, “Either send us a chronological resume, or we’ll pass.”  End of story.

The good news is he got a second chance.  Had he sent his resume directly to the employer it would have gone into the resume reject shredder.

Save your resume from the reject shredder

Over the past couple of years I’ve started to see quiet a lot of functional resumes and they are always a concern for me.

To put it bluntly they rarely, if ever, work for job hunters.

Here are some of the key reasons why, but if you want even more insight you should check out my 15 Free Video series at my companion website Essential Resume Strategies where you’ll discover how to write a resume that gets interviews.

To begin with a functional resume lumps all of your skills and achievements onto the front page, with little mention of which employer is related to each accomplishment.  In other words, it is impossible to get a “trend over time” correlation and understand if the most recent work is related to the job needs, or if it occurred years ago.

Often accomplishments that occurred years ago, but which might be more relevant to the current job requirements likely would have used different technology and/or processes making them less relevant.

Then, in the Work History section, you’ll find a listing something like this:

Accounting Manager, Company A, Dallas, TX, 2006-Present
Accounting Supervisor, Company B, Kansas City, KS, 2003-2006
Financial Analyst, Company C, Oklahoma City, OK, 1998-2003

…and so on, with absolutely no detail associated with each job.

As I mentioned above, hiring managers have rightfully developed a strong distrust for a functional resume. They’re often the reason you never get a response at all.

Worse still, many professional resume writers are selling the functional resume format with little regard to whether it works or not.  To some extent, professional resume writers don’t really know what works, or why even if they’ve been doing that type of work for a long, long time.

There is only one resume writing service that I ever recommend and you can see them here.  And there is only one source for a great selection of resume templates and they can be found here.

I’d prefer you write your own resume so I recommend this last resume template site only to get you started in finding a great template.  Avoid the free resume templates.  I explain why in my 15 FREE resume video series which are at Essential Resume Strategies.

When you use a functional resume, hiring managers and recruiters tend to believe that you have to be “hiding” something with the lack of descriptions for each job, and all your accomplishments lumped together.

Don’t even consider searching for functional resume examples and samples.  It’s a waste of your time.

There is a much better way to write your resume in a chronological format and I have devoted considerable information to exactly how to do that.  You’ll find my strategies at my companion website Essential Resume Strategies.