Posts Tagged ‘resumes’

Should I omit the graduation date on my resume?

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

According to a resume “expert” at a career website: “your degree is over 10 years old; time to take out the dates. Junior reviewers will toss your resume and make you a victim of age discrimination.”

Intentionally omitting dates is a colossal mistake, for two reasons: when you withhold information, you invite others to infer your reason for doing so; and, obscuring your years of experience will only cause you to be passed over for the most desirable positions.

In the case of this resume expert, the reason for omitting dates is: “junior reviewers will toss your resume and make you a victim of age discrimination”.

Why would junior reviewers toss the resume? Presumably, this expert believes that “junior” (or younger) resume reviewers discriminate against older job candidates, but reviewers who are not “junior” do not. In other words, this expert has learned that junior reviewers make mistakes in judging resumes that older workers do not.

Now if this expert has learned that older resume reviewers do a better job of judging resumes than younger reviewers, doesn’t it stand to reason that there are many, many hiring managers who appreciate the superior judgment of older workers?

I suspect this resume expert has little or no experience actually screening resumes and hiring people. I say so because, contrary to popular belief, hiring managers do NOT discriminate on the basis of age (or sex, color, race, etc.) as doing so would arbitrarily reduce the number of qualified candidates. It is hard enough to find well-qualified candidates to fill important positions, why make the task even harder by arbitrarily eliminating many of them?

Job seekers often tell me they get more interviews after they remove degree dates and some early jobs from their resume. When I ask if the increased number of interviews resulted in more job offers, the answer is always “no”.

It turns out that employers are actually quite rational. For a job with limited responsibility and requiring only moderate experience, the ideal candidate is one with minimal work experience and willing to work under less than ideal conditions, for low pay, in order to acquire more work experience.

For management positions with significant responsibilities, employers seek candidates with substantial breadth and depth of management and industry experience. For these positions, employers not only prefer older workers, younger workers won’t even be considered.

This is what you accomplish when you omit information in order to obscure your age: 1) more interviews for low-paying positions with negligible responsibility, and 2) fewer interviews for higher-paying positions requiring judgment, experience, industry knowledge, management skill, and wisdom.

Michael G Smith

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Posted in Job Seeking, Older Worker, Resume writing | 1 Comment »

What one thing will most improve my resume?

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

The most effective change most resume writers can make is to avoid listing the responsibilities of the position—as if writing a job description—and focus instead on notable successes and contributions achieved in the position. List personal accomplishments, not daily activities, and use specific numbers whenever possible, such as “ranked #2 out of 10″.

Most employers are not really interested in learning the fine details of each of your jobs–they can ask for more details in an interview if necessary. What they really want to know is how well you performed in the position.

List the successes for which you can take full, or at least primary, credit; don’t list trivial items, though, as that will give the appearance you contributed nothing of substance. Obviously, any performance-based award received from your employer should be noted.

Managers face a greater challenge with resume writing, as accomplishments often involve the efforts of many subordinates and the causal chain may not be obvious. For example, an increase in sales achieved by a division may be directly attributable to the efforts of the division’s sales manager, but the cause and effect relationship must be spelled out on the resume or it may appear that the manager was simply in the right place at the right time. A secondary benefit of elaborating on one’s role in effecting change is that the hiring manager sees the method underlying the success, instead of just the before and after.

Michael G Smith

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Posted in Job Seeking, Resume writing | No Comments »

What do you look for when reviewing resumes? How do you avoid overlooking a “golden nugget”?

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

I don’t think there are reliable shortcuts for reviewing resumes. The more time you take with each one, the less likely you are to set aside a viable candidate.

I don’t reject candidates for reasons not relevant to the job; that is, I don’t reject a candidate because the resume has spelling or grammar errors. I have found blunders in the resumes of successful journalists and authors, so unless I’m hiring someone to write resumes, I don’t use resume mistakes as reason to reject candidates.

I feel the same way about interviews; I don’t particularly care how well a candidate interviews, I’m only interested in how qualified the candidate is.

Screening resumes effectively depends on having a very specific list of qualifications required of a candidate in order to perform the job being filled. As a recruiter I have often found that the qualifications provided by the employer are too vague, irrelevant or simply too numerous. It’s best to boil down the qualifications to the two or three truly essential for the job and then reject all candidates lacking them without concern for rejecting a “golden nugget.”

I don’t think it makes sense, for example, to reject a candidate with, say, 10 years of appropriate experience because they don’t have a college degree. Of course I’d prefer the candidate to have a degree, but I’m trying to find the best candidate in a pile of resumes, and since this candidate’s experience demonstrates he or she is qualified, potentially even the best qualified, I’m not going to reject based on a preference for a college degree.

By looking at the last two or three jobs on the resume, I can quickly evaluate the candidate for two key considerations: 1. evidence of job stability; 2. appropriate work experience at the proper level of responsibility. Job stability is the most important consideration as far as I’m concerned; the candidate’s resume should be dominated by positions with at least three, and preferably five, years of tenure. A habit of job-hopping assures the resume will not be read.

Appropriate work experience is clearly a decision factor. If I need candidates with experience in nonprofit fundraising, then either nonprofit fundraising is on the resume or it’s not. I then evaluate the level of responsibility and the years the experience. Typically, I’m filling management positions, so the resume must list managerial experience of the scope, and for the length of time, that I previously determined are required.

If the requirements for the position are not entirely clear, or qualified candidates are likely to be hard to find, then I may decide to sort resumes during my initial review. I label resumes as: “unqualified,” “possibly qualified,” and “qualified.” After I’ve gone through the batch, if I have enough “qualified” resumes, I probably won’t revisit the “possibly qualified” batch. If not, then a more extensive reading of the resumes in the “possibly” batch is warranted, combined with some online research on those candidates.

Aside from job hopping as a reason to reject, any misrepresentation, intentional obfuscation, or lie will cause me to reject a resume without hesitation. If a candidate has no reservations about fibbing on the resume, they will fib on the job.

Michael G Smith

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Posted in Interviewing candidates, Job Seeking, Managing Employees, Resume writing, Screening candidates | No Comments »

Storing & organizing resumes without a dedicated program

Monday, May 5th, 2008

What candidate resume management tools or process do you find effective?

“We are a consulting firm and receive and retain hundreds of resumes annually. Currently these are retained physically in folders in a file cabinet in alphabetical order with notes detailing the hire/do not hire decision. Several people may take notes during the interview and they are all placed in the folder. We retain every candidate resume in order to be able to recall what it was that we liked or disliked about them and to have their contact info available on a moment’s notice; we frequently land an opportunity that prompts a quick hire or encounter the same folks during subsequent searches.

“You may have deduced that the volume assembled over more than fifteen years has become difficult to reference. Can you offer an application or process that you find effective?”

Philip J. Leonard III
Vice President of Operations
Diversified Project Management
Drawingfromnature.com

Answer:
Philip, I am surprised that, in this day and age, you work with paper resumes. By printing out a resume (or any document for that matter) you forgo the ability to search and retrieve it using powerful computer-based tools. Moreover, if you loose the paper resume, you also loose the notes and comments.

As a recruiter, I am deeply reliant on retrieving bits and pieces of information I’ve collected over time–including resumes and notes of conversations. Although I sometimes print out resumes in order to take notes, I always copy the notes back in to my PC. It doesn’t matter where or in what format notes are kept since I use Google Desktop to retrieve all the information I need.

Say, for example, that I am aware of a potential candidate for a position I wish to fill and I want to pull together any notes or resumes I might have. I type the candidate’s name (”pete moss”) into my Google Deskbar search (on my computer’s taskbar) and Google will retrieve every reference to that name anywhere in my PC–every resume, note, outlook file, spreadsheet, email, even any website I’ve visited that had the words “pete moss” on it.

This ability to search through my whole computer (like Google searches the entire web) without regard to the location of data frees me from the requirement of keeping my information neatly stored in some particular “resume management system.” My computer IS the system.

Furthermore, Google allows you to coordinate searches between computers, so you can search through resumes, notes, and other data that the HR Director has on the HR department system and they can search through your information as well.

Ideally, you should not be storing hand written notes of interviews anyway. Each interviewer should debrief in a consistent manner–a short memo is fine–and then email that to the person coordinating the hire. Better still, upload the note to Google documents for storage and sharing, or use one of Microsoft’s many group collaboration tools. This solves the problem of record keeping, searching and group access all at once.

I realize it’s comforting to know exactly where your data is stored, but you no longer need to do so. Tools exist that can instantly retrieve information from the nooks and crannies of your hard drives–Google remembers where your data is, so you don’t have to.

Michael G Smith

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Posted in Interviewing candidates, Managing Employees | No Comments »