Interesting post and news this week on Monster.com and Microsoft Office Online, “Four steps to your next job,” creating a new partnership to help the active job seeker. In the example they start to cite a specific individual’s pain and launch into this combined marketing program. A suggestion is made to utilize the Microsoft Office templates to help develop your resume. Now, unlike many of my peers or other resume writing service providers, I am not opposed to this and thus writing a negative post. Nope, I think it’s a great idea if you have no resume to work with and/or can’t afford or are unable to seek out help.

Living in “the land of resumes” as the electronic age has provided to HR and recruiters alike, I can tell you that a resume DOES make a difference in your job search. Having just the right ingredients, as Greg Miller has pointed out in previous posts, makes all the difference in the world. Too much and it’s usually overlook, not enough and it’s overlooked. I say equally important are the style, format and key selling points.

Take for example sales people which I work with on a daily basis as one of our key niche areas. When a client looks to our firm to help hire a true sales professional they are looking for a resume and candidate profile that speak sales. Duh say most of you. Duh is right but how come I still see what accumulates to the hiring manager or client as a non-professional? No stats or highlights on their successful sales career, recent accomplishments, numbers, ranking related to peers or their industry, deals won, and so forth. What happens is a lot of time spent with me or my team in creating a separate document or re-writing their resume to reflect these highlights that all VP of Sales or CEOs are looking for in true professionals!

As I wrote about in both ATS issues and resume formats, having a very complex format or even the new Office 07 .dox can be detrimental if the recruiter or hiring authority on the other end is not able to open it. That’s it, game over, done. Well not quite as if you get your career coaching from me, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up! Would you rather start with a tool which helps your job search or a template which might inhibit it?

In short, templates are a great tool and how I got my first job as a recruiter coming out of the military with no resume (boy that was a sad resume), but I strongly suggest seeking guidance in some fashion to help put you ahead of the pack. The best templates are those with simple and standard formatting. The templates I would stay away from have text boxes, rows, columns, etc.

Good luck in your career search!

Chris

For assistance with your resume from The Wellington Group staff visit The Career Store or Get in Touch.

Chris Wellington “The Recruiting Guy”, President, The Wellington Group

OK I SAID! Now that I got that off my chest let me point you to the root of my angst. Recruiting, like any other profession, has it s own social media / networking sites where we all get to share insight, tips, tricks and yes even humor. One such site is ere.net. The post getting all the attention today was “Bullet Point to the Head” by Matt Charney.

Matt’s post was very well written and very much on target. Just look below the article at all the comments. Everything from “I can relate” to “no, that is not me.” In my years of living as a professional recruiter I have seen his comments in-action more times than not. Too much perceived work on a recruiter or even HR’s desk so they have to fly through resumes as fast as they can, learning tricks to skim and weed-out in what they feel is an expeditious manner. Why, because they are lazy.

Don’t believe me, ok. But here is a true fact. Most large HR groups, Staffing Firms and Professional Search Groups receive so much resume traffic they have to hire staff just to filter and scan or purchase software to totally remove the human component. I can remember weeks at Manpower where we might receive 5,000 applicants. In addition to this the recruiting publications are now telling HR and Talent Manager they NEED to automate. Check out the latest Talent Management article on “Make HR Happy.”

On top of this, many of today’s recruiting demographic has the technology / MTV curse of “if it’s not instant it’s not worth my time.” So, they expect every candidate to have a resume laid out in a similar fashion with all the goodies at scan level in 2.3 seconds. The trouble is that many professionals are great at their jobs but not with working on their resume (see my previous post on 8 Musts for an Effective Resume). Lazy recruiters are grab-and-go, great recruiters are diamond miners, polishing off the mud to find the sparkle below…many times at their own expense.

What is the solution? I think the bump we hit in the economy helped create some of the cure, causing recruiters and HR to transform their skills or try performing it from the unemployment line. The other solution, better management of both corporate and third-party recruitment practices. Accountability to the primary goal, recruitment and review with the intention of uncovering the best talent for the right job.

Chris

To hire The Recruiting Guy as a speaker or trainer visit The Recruiting Guy or contact The Wellington Group @ info@thewellington-group.com.