3 Ways to Trouble-Shoot Your Resume
The average resume gets less than 10 seconds in front of a recruiter, before being cast aside—and that’s assuming that a recruiter is reading it at all in an age where automated scanning software is increasingly being used to filter applications by keyword search before a human ever sets eyes on them. Here are three ways that you can trouble-shoot some of the most common resume problems.
Beat the machines
Automated filters that scan resumes are the bane of the job-seeker’s existence. Worse, they’re not even particularly effective in helping companies to find qualified candidates—all they do is limit the amount of candidates a firm will see to those who have the right combination of words on their documents. To ensure that you are among them, be sure to include keywords from the resume—both for personality fit (terms like “enthusiastic” and “organized”) as well as for specific skills listed in the requirements. If the ad states that proficiency in a software package is required, you’d better believe that the firm is using the name of that package as a search term—and your name won’t come out if it’s not on your resume.
Lack of experience
Once it’s made it past the robots, the next thing your resume has to do is convince a human that you’re worth bringing in for an interview. But how can you do that, if you don’t have the requisite experience for the position?
Volunteer jobs are great ways of receiving work experience in a field that you haven’t yet been able to break into as a paid employee. The jobs can be listed exactly like regular positions (title, achievement list, dates)—there is no need to indicate that it was a volunteer position on the resume. If you do openly list a volunteer position on your resume, the question may arise of what you used as income during that period. If you’re proud of your wage-earning position at that time, and believe it contributes to your job goal, list both, and indicate that your volunteer stint was a “concurrent volunteer position.”
If the paying job you had while you performed your volunteer position was basically irrelevant to your career goal, you may, of course, omit it. You may also mention it in your description of your volunteer position, by putting “Concurrent with” and the position and company name of the job. You thus relay that information in an honest manner, while still downplaying its relevance to your job objective.
Age
Age is an issue at every job. Your employer will often have a sense of their ideal candidate’s age as well as qualifications. Yes, it’s illegal, but nearly inescapable. So what are they afraid of? Well, let’s look:
Source: blogs.vault.com
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