Carl Bradford

Posts Tagged ‘Resume Examples’

You worked hard on your resume format, and visited a number of online sources to learn how to write a resume, looked at the most popular resume examples and samples.  You considered online resume builder software solutions during your resume preparation.  You feel like you’ve covered all the important bases as you learned how to make a resume that you’re comfortable with.

Now you feel confident you have the best resume format possible.   You even saved the resume as an Adobe PDF document to protect all your nice formatting.

Applying to the great job with your new resume

Your resume just arrived via email to that great job post you found a few minutes ago.  You know, the one that reads like it was hand tailored just for you.

Andy, the company recruiter has just arrived to begin work, sits down at his desk, turns on his computer and logs in to review all the resumes now sitting in his electronic in-box.  Your resume is among those he is scheduled to review.

He takes a sip of coffee, clicks his mouse and the resume reviews begin.  How will your resume stack up?

Finally he gets to your resume and opens it for review. What he sees is a completely wrecked format.  Spaces between paragraphs have been removed, there are some odd characters in place of those nice bullet points, information in columns and tables are now completed scrambled.  He can’t make heads or tails of your resume.  Frustrated and with only a few seconds (no more than about 30 seconds), to spend on each resume before deciding whether or not to continue his review, he moves your resume into the  reject stack.

You’ve just experienced a resume failure.

What happened behind the scene to your resume

Here’s what happened to you.  Technology “ate your resume.”

Many employers do not receive your resume via email, instead your resume is parased into their ATS (Applicant Tracking System).  In other words, technology interpreted your resume formatting and attempted to put it into a readable form within the ATS so it could be read easily by the recruiter and then managed much like a sales professional manages customer profiles within their customer relationship management system.

While not all ATS will scramble your resume like this, many will.  The trouble is, you have no way of knowing if the recruiter for that great job is using one that is user friendly to your resume or not.

The solution is never to use a resume format that runs the risk of getting abused by technology.  There are best resume formats that are safe to use and will avoid your resume going into that dreaded “resume black hole.”

This problem is aggreviated by the fact that most professional resume writers don’t have the behind the scene background that I do.  You’ll understand why when you read my bio.

You can find out just which format is the best resume format by viewing my FREE resume videos at my companion web site: Essential Resume Strategies.

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.

Inaccurate advice about resumes is all over the Internet so it’s no wonder that about 95% of all resumes I read aren’t very good and the majority are just plain unacceptable.

Most people just don’t know how to write a resume that gets interviews and after all that is the first and foremost reason for having a resume in the first place. It’s not the only reason, but its the most important reason.

I review hundreds of resumes every month and I’ve been doing it for over 40 years – see my bio – so I know what works and what doesn’t.  Most resumes don’t work!

An example of misdirected resume advice

I’ve just finished recording and making available 15 Free Resume Videos that illustrate the strategies that I personally use to increase the number of interviews I get for my candidates by over 300%. You can access them all at my companion website Essential Resume Strategies.

So, I wanted to see just what other videos might be available of You-Tube, so I quickly launched a search under the broad topic of resumes.  The very first video that came up was a short video about how to properly structure your resume.  I notice the video as of today had 32,481 views.

The trouble is one piece of advice is to include an objective on your resume.  Now admittedly this was perhaps directed to new college graduates, but the video didn’t say that.  Anyway, I have proven that when you include an objective statement in your resume, it’s the wrong thing to do over 99% of the time.  By proven, it means I’ve tested this in what marketers would call an A/B or split test.

I won’t go into the reasons here in this blog post, but I make my case in the 15  Free Video series at Essential Resume Strategies.  They’re free and I suggest you go there now and access them.  In these 15 videos I go over strategies.  I doubt you’ll find some of these strategies anywhere else, but they’re part of the reason I was able to increase the number of interviews I get for my candidates by 312%.

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.