Resume Tips:  Know Your Audience, What to Include and Avoid 

When it comes time to write your resume most people often overlook the proper audience for their life’s work.  Accordingly, you may not realize why your resume isn’t generating interviews.  The audience for your resume is not necessarily the hiring manager.  Rather it’s a Resume Screener.  Marketing correctly to these gatekeepers is something many job seekers overlook.

Higher unemployment figures mean more people are submitting resumes for open positions whether they are qualified or not.  How does a company sort through this haystack?  Enter the resume screener.  

Given tight time constraints, a screener looks at resumes who best match the manager-mandated job criteria.  It is not necessarily their goal to determine who is merely capable of performing the role.  Overall, the best resumes offer:

·        Easy to identify job criteria matches

·        Clean and stable work history

·        Clear career progression 

·        Proper attention to detail including formatting and grammar

Goal:  Help the screener quickly determine if your experience matches what their manager wants. 

Your resume must be flexible.  If you simply upload your resume and click ‘send’, you’ll be cut for sure.  Modify your resume to reflect as many of the listed job criteria as possible.  Do not overlook responsibilities or qualification requirements. 

Your resume must translate well.  If you’ve worked in similar settings before – e.g. industry, size, ownership, global reach -- advertise it!  Perhaps you’ve supervised the same number of people or reported to a similar manager required.  Your resume needs to highlight these key points.

Your resume must be legible.  It is easy for the eye to scan through well formatted resumes.  Use bullet points, boldface, underline and where appropriate, always note special achievements – awards, cost saving initiatives, revenue generating initiatives, and team achievements.

Your resume must be direct.  Avoid long paragraphs.  Be concise.  Work history for the last ten years must include the month employment changed.  Omission of dates leads to questions about gaps in employment.  Unanswered questions will delay your resume.

Keeping these four tenets in mind allows initial and subsequent screeners to quickly determine if your resume makes the cut.  

Quick tips to rewrite your resume with a resume screener in mind:

1. Start with a long version of your resume including everything you’ve done in detail.  Include accurate dates, duties, achievements, education, software, vocational skills, etc.  Organize them in easy to read bullet points listing the most important ones (for the new position) first. 
   
2. Learn more about the organization and job description.  Review the company website and use a job description as a guideline.  Don’t expect the actual job to follow the description exactly as written.  Condense your long version by including only pertinent items.  Rearrange your bullet points to best match criteria. 
   
3. Include an objective or summary paragraph that best fits the specific position.  If it’s difficult to describe the position as your ideal role, it’s a good gauge this may not be the job for you.  Better to drop this item altogether than be vague or include too many business cliché’s.
   
4. When listing your job history, describe briefly note the size and marketplace your past employers compete in.  This allows your reader to more easily compare your history with their needs.  For example: 
   
   Dunder Mifflin Incorporated, Nashua, NH
   $175 million regional paper and office supply distributor (NYSE: DMI) with an emphasis on servicing small-business clients. Corporate headquarters in New York City with eight regional offices in the northeast. 
   
5. Be honest.  Aside from misrepresentation as cause for dismissal, omitting months of employment or graduation years lead to questions.  You want to provide screeners with answers.  If employment gaps are long, discuss in a brief cover letter or list as a bullet point:  e.g. Company sold.
   
6. Write a brief cover letter to summarize where you match criteria and qualifications.

Other items to include:

1. Multiple contact options
2. Proper formatting:  Use indentations, bullets, tab alignments and columns.  If you list MS Word as a skill set your resume format should be crisp.
3. Format suggestion: 

Company, location, dates of employment (tab alignment to end of ruler).

Title, dates position held (tab alignment to end of ruler) Short description of company, industry, revenue size, local/domestic or international exposure

Value added proposition 1: Led project team on implementation of company wide… resulting in annual savings of $x.

Value added proposition 2+: make use of bold and underline of action words

Standard Responsibilities: save these for last

Rinse and repeat as necessary based on resume length.

List separate Software Skills section. Candidate searches are conducted using key words.  Oracle, SAP, Hyperion, Great Plains, pivot tables etc are all skill sets employers value. List them multiple times where applicable and your resume will end-up seeing more air time.

Items to avoid:

1. Cute phrases – jack-of-all trades, school of hard knocks
2. Typos and spelling – to/too, which/witch, etc.
3. Misrepresentation
4. Acronyms – spell it out the first time
5. Resumes written in MS Excel
6. Do not start comments with “I…”
7. If you have less than 8 years experience, limit resume to one page.
8. Complex sentences, “I/We did…”, Articles (the, a, an):  i.e. “Retrained the staff” should be “retrained staff”
9. Do not mail your resume.  It delays delivery time and worse, makes the screener wonder if you can use a computer.  Should they still want to consider you, you are making extra work for the screener to scan your resume so they can forward it internally (which is what you want isn’t?).
   

Always remember that a resume screener’s number one goal is to find resumes that best match the job criteria.  It is not to approve resumes where they think someone is capable or has the aptitude to succeed in the position.  Targeting your resume with the Resume Screener in mind is the best way to get your resume the time it deserves.