Tips from a Recruiter: Don't Make Me Read Your Resume

The Avanti Group LLC Recruiting & Leadership Tips from a Recruiter: Don't Make Me Read Your Resume

I will read your résumé unless it's 10 pages, but (just as you didn't want to write your résumé) I really don't want to read your résumé. To put it another way, I don't want to read it because I must in order to make a yes/no decision.

This post originally appeared Job Tips for Geeks.

Ideally, I can decide to speak to you based on a few sentences in the body of an email/application, and then primarily read the résumé to prepare for our initial dialogue and use it as a framework during the call. Give me a few sentences to make me want to have that talk.

I never ask for or expect a full cover letter with addresses and dates and all the formatting. Personally, I don't want to read that either, and I'd rather not task applicants with the hassle. All we're trying to do is start a conversation, and it shouldn't take much to get it started. Reading only a few sentences before making a decision will clearly make my job easier, but it will make the job seeker's life a bit better as well. There is much less pressure to have the perfect résumé if you can get past the first stage without that document being carefully judged. Invest five minutes in the application, and you can spend less time customizing résumés.

Roughly 50% of the applications I receive are résumé only. In 2013, almost 90% of my client hires included additional content. The data set is not large, but over my 15 years I'd expect that the figures would be rather consistent. Whether applying for an advertised job via email, an online application, or even if you are just blindly sending a résumé in the off chance a company might consider you for hire, the key concepts to address in the content that accompanies the résumé are: