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« Last post by Innuendo on September 07, 2014, 10:06 AM »
You have seven seconds.
More on this in a bit, but let's start at the beginning, shall we? When you spot a position you are wanting to apply for, don't send in the stock, default version of your resume. If you do, your resume will never make it through the gauntlet and reach the person who can make this a happy ending for you.
Someone mentioned that you shouldn't load up your resume with jargon because the people in HR won't understand the terminology. There's an element of truth to this, but there's a certain amount of jargon that must be present or, again, the running of the gauntlet will be a failure. Allow me to explain why. The job market has changed drastically in the last few years, at least in the United States. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people will apply for each position.
In order to help separate the applicants who are worthy of further attention from the time-wasters who apply for every job they see, a lot of companies are implementing automation. This means that quite often the first person to see your resume isn't a person at all. It's a computer program designed to parse the resumes of all the applicants, retain the ones that reach a certain percentage threshold of hitting on all the key phrases and jargon that someone somewhere has decided that will show if a candidate is worthy or unworthy. Please, please, please be acutely aware that it does not matter how awesome you are, how perfect you are for the job, and that your resume and cover letter are literary works that would make Shakespeare himself break down and weep. No human eye sees your submission at this point. If your resume does not meet the minimum requirements of jargon and key phrases at this point, your hard work will be quietly jettisoned into the black hole of the internet with no notification sent to you or the employer. It will simply be as though you had not applied for the position at all. Period.
Now before you freak out and start scrambling around screaming questions like what key phrases? What jargon? Do they expect me to be psychic? Just take a deep breath and relax. The company has already given you a blueprint to succeed. The job posting is more than just a description of duties. It's a road map to what this company is looking for. It will list all the key phrases and jargon you'll need to get past the automated slice-and-dice designed to keep the unworthy from stepping foot inside the corporate building.
While we're on the subject of the automated routines, often a job posting will include a line that says that applications are accepted until a certain date. Do *not* let that lure you into a false sense of non-urgency. Oh, sure, you can happily submit your resume up till the very last day if you wish, but do you remember those thousands of people applying for this position I mentioned earlier? A lot of companies help the weeding out process along by programming the system to only accept x amount of submissions. Any submissions received beyond that number....quietly jettisoned.
Now, say you managed to make it past the slice-and-dice. What happens next? This is when the submissions that are left actually reach a human and land in the hiring manager's in-bin. They view submissions with a program that uses that aforementioned list of key phrases and jargon to highlight everywhere they appear in the resume so they can examine the syntax and the context of the words.
This is where you have seven seconds. Hiring managers will spend seven seconds or less looking over your resume before deciding if it should be sent along to the next step in the hiring process or thrown out. If you just took all those words and threw them in a list to rack up a high percentile score in the automated phase, you're most likely out. If your words are dry and uninspired...mundane...you're most likely out.
Unless you are a rock star in your chosen profession and your job descriptions and job titles make hearts quiver and stir up feelings of envy, you're probably going to need to use those sections of your resume that go beyond job experience to catch the hiring manager's eye. Academic excellence, unique volunteer/charity work, unique life experiences are all ways to nudge the hiring manager to break the rules and spend an extra couple seconds on the awesomeness that is your resume. Remain truthful at all times, but if there's something exceptional about you then you need to mention it without being too boisterous about it.
Again, unless you are a rock star in your chosen profession, chances are good there are going to be a hundred people with job experience exactly like yours, maybe better. You need to convey that your benefits to the organization go beyond hard skills and you bring competent soft skills to the table as well, the total package. The name of the game at this point is to convince the hiring manager to put your resume into the pile that will be forwarded to the department head.
If you've done all this and managed to get in front of the department head's eyes as long as you've put your job skills forward in an honest and competent fashion, there's not much you can do beyond that. They usually know what they are looking for when they sit down to hire someone, but...you never know. Maybe if you aren't exactly what they are looking for, those mentions of academic excellence or other things might be enough to catch their eye & they'll take a chance on calling you in for an interview anyway.
P.S. Follow Miles' advice to the letter. With the advances in technology, the time when someone could fabricate credentials and get away with it has passed.
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