There’s A Reason Your Resume Isn’t Getting Responses

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Ok, you’re looking for a job.  Maybe you already have one and need a change or maybe you don’t and have been searching for a while.  You post your resume on one of the multitude of job boards and wait for a response.  Then you wait some more.  And some more…and some more…and now it’s been a few months and you still haven’t gotten anything.  Why?  Well, I’m going to be brutally honest with you on some of the most common reasons recruiters are passing over your resume.

1.  Reading Tolstoy is easier than reading your resume.

Most Recruiters spend a lot of time reading through a lot of resumes.  So when yours shows up in their in box looking like a page out of War and Peace, I guarantee they aren’t going to invest the time to read it.  All of your jobs are smashed together and you’ve decided to write paragraphs describing your previous duties instead of neatly bulleted points.  If you stick with this method, your initial objective better be Oscar worthy because that’s about as far as we’ll read before we decide whether to invest more time or not.  Another issue is acronyms. In your mind, NAMOFC has a meaning, but to a Recruiter who hasn’t worked for your company, it’s just alphabet soup.  I really see the letters flying from members of our military trying to transition to the civilian world, so be aware of it and spell it out.

2.  You’ve got some HUGE gaps in your resume.

I realize that your intent here is to entice someone into giving you an interview so you can explain all the gaps.  But the truth is, if there are a lot of them and they are longer than six months each, you mostly likely won’t get that chance.  My advice, explain them on your resume.  It will increase your chances.

3.  You just don’t have the background for the position you’ve applied to.

Now this is specifically addressing those that have sent in their resume to a particular post versus just posting on the job board directly.  Just because you’ve read the job description and in your mind, you know you can do the job, doesn’t mean the person doing the screening agrees with you.  Granted, they should be sending you some kind of response letting you know that. (See my previous post on the Black Hole of Resumes). But they don’t always do that.  It’s time to pull up your big kid pants and face the reality that if the job requires an engineering degree and you only have a high school diploma, desire alone isn’t going to get you there.

So how can you increase your chances of getting your resume looked at?  Well, that’s the topic of another blog now isn’t it?  😉