RESUME PRESENTATION
Does A Low Unemployment Market Affect Resume Presentation?
With the local Australian economy experiencing relatively low unemployment figures and with the papers sprouting that jobs are there for the plucking, it has flittered across my mind that perhaps my services as a professional résumé writer, assisting clients to stand out from the other applicants, are not needed as much as they once were.
After all, if jobs are that easy to come by, and if employers are that desperate, having a résumé that is well formatted, that contains all the critical information and key words and that highlights the job seeker’s skills and achievements, isn’t going to mean that much. The employer or recruitment consultant will be grateful for the few résumés he or she receives and will eagerly grab any candidate.
WRONG!
I recently received this comment in an email from a consultant at a major national recruitment firm:
“Lately I have been finding more and more that either I am being asked for résumé advice or feel I need to give it. I am receiving consistently poor résumés, which I generally put down to:
■ Laziness of applicants,
■ Not knowing any better or
■ A perceived lack of importance seen by candidates at this stage of the recruitment process.
It may simply be a Generation Y thing where candidates feel the jobs will or should come to them with little or no effort made on their behalf? Some of the most common issues I find with résumés are:
■ They don’t sell the person well (e.g. are just a description of employment history, etc);
■ They are far too wordy: generally I feel they should be shorter, sharper, punchier, and attract interest (sell someone) more quickly.
■ They are not specific in content towards the role/industry people are applying for (are obviously generic résumés being sent for any job).”
This recruiter’s complaint was that he simply could not see any value in these applicants. He finds himself constantly having to tell candidates they are less likely to be selected for an interview, or will be totally rejected by either himself or the client, by presenting with documents full of mistakes, irrelevant and too wordy.
Unattractive formatting was another area he found to be a complete turnoff when choosing his short list.
After this email I contacted another recruitment consultant in an upmarket company I deal with and asked if she found a difference in standards since the unemployment level had come down.
Her response confirmed what I had just ‘heard’.
“…people flick off CVs here there and everywhere without much thought. Often we don’t even get a cover letter…the formatting is poor, spelling mistakes, too much jargon and buzz words which don’t have much depth…”
Instead of taking advantage of the market, many job seekers have become complacent and are shooting themselves in the foot.
The outcome of the lower rate is not a market where job seekers are confidently honing in on a number of roles that suit their expertise and confidently formatting a document – or documents – that will assist them in advancing their career and even gaining a higher income or more valuable package.
The outcome is that too many job seekers have become lazy and complacent and are ruling themselves out of jobs that they may easily have secured.
So if you think it is easy to walk into an interview today without taking too much trouble, then think again. Unless the applicant presents him or herself in the best possible light, he or she still may not capture that interview.
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One response to “RESUME PRESENTATION”
Some good points there Beverley. As a business owner, it can be challenging when you have a position to be filled and you go through all the necessary processes, only to find that out of all the applications received, none of them motivate you to want to interview the job seeker!