…And How to Dust Yourself Off And Get Results
I’ve been in the hiring seat a bunch of times. I’ve also been the one to recruit and interview on behalf of employers I represented, and instruct people on my team how to screen with a bias for quality.
Some mistakes have been so common that I found it genuinely baffling. Sites like LinkedIn and TheMuse provide a Holy Grail of information about how to not be like everyone else and make the same mistakes that result in job rejection over and over again. Career information is so readily and widely available, that this has become one of the enduring mysteries of the universe for me:
How come people keep screwing up their job applications as if it’s not an indicator of future job performance?
But I’m no Neil deGrasse Tyson and I have no answers about the mysteries of the universe. People love making the same mistakes over and over again expecting different results. It’s just one of the foibles that make us human. All I can do is arm you with good information and hope you’ll make better choices.
So here are the mistakes I saw when I was hiring, and that I keep seeing with my Joy Adjacent clients. These mistakes are the reasons employers don’t invite you for interviews. Since I really want you to get invited for interviews and finally launch your awesome career, I’m sharing some tips on what to do to change your fate.
1. Your work experience lists job duties instead of accomplishments.
You gotta look at this from the hiring manager’s and recruiter’s perspective. They’ve been in this game for a while. So they know, more or less, what tasks each job title requires. Account executive? Sales goals and external relationship management. Data scientist? Develop custom analysis models and algorithms.
I already know what the job entails, since I’m hiring for it, so you don’t have to tell me!
But hey, so long as I’m here reading your application anyway, why don’t you take this time to tell me something I don’t know. I have no idea who you are or how you did your job in a special way that sets you apart from the 300 other account executives or data scientists who are vying for my attention. Why don’t you tell me that? What did you accomplish in your last role that only happened because YOU were there to make it happen? See, now I’m listening. :)
Pro tip: A quick trick to help you convert job duties into accomplishments is to ask yourself “why was I performing this task?” or “what was the purpose of this task?” For example, if you were a data entry clerk somewhere, one of your tasks was to “enter data”. But that’s completely not interesting to me as an employer considering you for a job. Now, if you were to tell me what greater good was accomplished by your entering of this data, I’d be more inclined to keep reading. So try something like: “Entered data to improve firm’s predictive accuracy by digitizing historical information” or “Input and digitized 300 terabytes of manual records to enable large-scale analysis”.
(Want to learn more about how to convert your job duties into accomplishments? Email me.)
This resume format makes me sad I came to work this morning.
Now I want to binge-watch Netflix to avoid seeing more resumes like this.
2. Your template is visually boring and unappealing.
Just like your suit and shoes at the interview, your resume is your visual first impression. So look professional.
Even if you think you’re the world’s most diligent worker, if your resume does not look organized or show me that you put some effort into it, I’m going to assume you’ll take the same phone-it-in approach on the job.
If I don’t feel like you made an effort with your job application, I will not be convinced that you’ll make an effort on the job if I hire you.
Consequently, I will not hire you.
(There are tons of gorgeous, ATS-friendly templates available online to make this part super easy and even fun for you. I can help you design one that’s appropriate to your industry and adapt your current format to something more compelling.)
3. Your resume lacks a narrative tying it together.
You have a decade or more of experience. Or maybe you’re just one of those super talented humans who managed to do a lot before you even graduated college, and you have the four-page resume to prove it.
Save all that detail for your memoirs. Your resume needs a clear, consistent, and concise narrative that ties one job position into the next and makes an unassailable case to the employer that you’re just the person for the job.
This means removing any job details and even entire positions that don’t fit the narrative you want to convey. Be brutal. Chop that baby up. Decide what message you want the hiring manager to hear loud and clear, and ask yourself if every part of your resume supports that message. If something does not support that message, it’s a distraction, and it will confuse the hiring manager. Get rid of it.
Bottom line: If I have to make an effort to figure out what you’re offering, sorry, but I’m too busy. You gotta help me out! Spoon-feed it to me because I’m too busy to even chew. Really.
(Developing professional narrative is my unique selling proposition as a career and job search consultant. Thanks to my writing and communications experience, crafting cohesive narrative is one of my particular strengths when working with a client. Learn more about the power of narrative and how I use it in my method.)
4. Your keywords do not match the job description, and don't solve the hiring manager's business problem.
Help me help you by speaking my language.
If I’m the hiring manager and I have a role open on my team, it means I have a business problem that I want to solve and believe that a new hire will help me solve my business problem. I desperately want to alleviate this problem by finding just the right candidate to make it go away. The job description I wrote is basically my Christmas wishlist for my perfect candidate.
The more of your resume that matches my job description, the more you help me believe in Santa again. And the likelier my call to you.
It’s really easy to adapt your resume to each job description, and does not require a wholesale revision. Simply read the job posting and highlight key verbs and nouns that describe how the job should be done. Then go through your resume and switch out similar words and synonyms for the words in the job posting.
For example, if the job posting calls for “vendor relationship management” and your experiences and accomplishments talk about “managing key external resources”, simply reword so you speak the language of the hiring manager.
Need even more help? Try copying and pasting your target job descriptions into a word cloud tool to see which important keywords need to be emphasized. Then customize the word choice in your resume to match the word cloud.
(More pro tips like this available to my clients. Let’s chat.)
5. GRAMMAR, SPELLING, PUNCTUATION, CONSISTENT FORMATTING.
SORRY NOT SORRY ALL CAPS!!1!!!1 Sore subject.
This comes back to putting in the effort so that the quality of your job application acts like a teaser trailer for the quality of the work you’ll do if I hire you.
I’ll make you sad if I tell you how many times I come across misspelled words, accomplishments that jump between past and present tense, random bullet styles, and multiple fonts.
In professional roles, there’s a high likelihood you will interact externally outside the company. In so doing, you represent the company and the high standards it seeks to project to the world. If you don’t project a stellar, irreproachable image of yourself as an applicant, chances are absolutely zero that you’ll be able to curate and convey a professional image of my company when you interact with my clients, partners, vendors, and competitors. Plus, it tells me that your lack of attention to detail means that someone will have to micromanage your work to ensure excellence, and that costs me money.
Have an eagle-eyed proofreader review your resume, bullet by bullet, word for word. Then, have someone else do it. Are you 1,000% certain that your resume is perfect by the time you click Submit? If you are not 1,000% certain, go back and check it again.
6. Your structure gets blocked by ATS filters, so recruiters never see your resume.
Corporations and larger sized companies use something called an Applicant Tracking System to manage applications. Apparently, it helps to collect, store, and filter resumes.
In reality, it’s where resumes go to die.
Thousands of candidates apply for jobs at top companies, and those with poorly-formatted resumes or resumes where the words don’t match the preset filters automatically get tossed.
The few that pass the ATS filter are still unlikely to get noticed because recruiters are too busy. Personal contacts and applicants who can get their resumes directly in front of the recruiter or hiring manager get priority.
There is some art and science to formatting and writing resumes in such a way as to pass the ATS filter, and I can help you do this. But honestly? If this is your main concern, you’re already set up for failure.
You need to get your resume in front of a human, or you’ll be applying forever. Internalize this.
Quit hitting Easy Apply on LinkedIn and actually do some networking. That’s how 70% of jobs get found!
(Yes, I can teach you this.)
7. Your language is mostly adjectives and adverbs instead of verbs and nouns, so the resume is full of fluff but no real content.
Please get to the point and sound polished.
This is not polished:
“Highly motivated professional”
“Detail oriented sales leader”
“Results driven collaborator”
“Consistently met ambitious quarterly sales targets"
“Efficiently managed time and resources on challenging projects”
Language full of adjectives and adverbs as in the above does not help your case. Useless filler words take up valuable real estate in your resume. This real estate could be put to better use by quantifying and illustrating the value you brought to the work.
Don’t tell me how brilliant and stellar you are. Show me.
Aim for a ratio of nouns+verbs to adjectives+adverbs of no less than 80:20. If you’ve got more than 20% of the latter, revise.
8. Your experience lacks quantifiable achievements.
You don’t have to be a banker or engineer. Even comms and marketing professionals can quantify their accomplishments. I should know -- I am one!
I know it’s easier to name numbers when you manage concrete budgets, conduct transactions of a specific size, or bring in a certain number of clients per quarter. But you should be able to estimate the efficiencies you created by streamlining a process, the number of personnel impacted by an improvement you introduced, or the size of the market you reached through your campaign.
Absolutely everything is quantifiable if you know how to frame the statement, and in a data-driven world, there is no excuse for a resume without numbers.