Recruiter-IZE Your Resume and Finally Get some Interviews
A friend of mine was angry. After a decade of writing screenplays with no success, after reading books on writing and submitting and formatting, her mantle was not only Oscar less, she had no mantle. But what got her mad was meeting a woman in her SPIN class who worked for a household name film studio and told her the truth.
“They not only don’t read most of the scripts,” my friend reported, umbrage front and center, but the ones they do read are read by entry level kids, who, get this, are trying to get their own scripts read, so of course they reject mine. What an insane system!”
Not really, I thought to myself. The system works fine. No shortage of movies on my On Demand system. And more on the way. I know this because my success has been in the recruiting world, and I know that resume writing drives people as crazy as the movie writing business does for my friend.
Because most of what you have been told is either not true or no longer true about resumes.
And why would you know this? I ran a Google search about ‘resume writing’ and found 26 million items! And they all offer the same old bromides. ‘Make it pleasing to the eye’, ‘your goal is to avoid being at the bottom of the pile of resumes in Personnel!’ Seriously? When were these books written? Who was President? There are no ‘Piles’ of resumes in a digital world, and ‘personnel’ has been renamed Human Resources about a generation or two ago. And you can’t be ‘pleasing to the eye’ when everyone is sending the resume via the same Outlook format. These books, no doubt relevant in their day, are fecklessly reprinted every time there is a recession because we know people will be dusting off resumes and looking for an edge. But to give the same well worn advice now that technology has changed both the purpose of resumes and the delivery system, is to literally cost people interviews rather than help them acquire them.
Submitting resumes is my lifeblood as recruiter. If I am out of touch with how it’s done, I starve. And that just isn’t going to happen! So let me help you RecruiterIZE your resume:
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About the Author
Danny Cahill is the author of Harper’s Rules: A Recruiter’s Guide to Finding a Dream Job and the Right Relationship. A popular keynote speaker and recruiter, he is the owner of Hobson Associates, one of America’s largest search firms. He is also the founder of www.AccordingtoDanny.com, an online training and mentoring company dedicated to enhancing the skills and jumpstarting the spirits of recruiters worldwide. For more information, please visit www.harpersrules.com or www.hobsonassoc.com. To read Danny’s complete biography, click here.
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