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Why Your Resume Should Be Customized
Posted in: Blog by admin on December 23, 2010
When you submit a resume to an employer, you could be competing against hundreds or thousands of other job seekers. Your resume cannot land you a job by itself, but it can keep you getting hired. To be successful, you need to maximize the effectiveness of every resume you send.
If your resume is getting little to no response from employers, there are some changes you can make. Approaching your resume as a sales presentation instead a pure informational document is the first step. You need to understand how employers look at a resume and tailor it to their needs.
The Employer’s Perspective
Why do employers fail to respond to most job seekers? The reason is simple – when companies post a job, they receive thousands of resumes that have nothing to do with the job. It is incredibly easy to submit a resume online. There are services that will send a resume to thousands of companies at a push of a button.
Companies need to screen these resumes. With a large portion of the resumes only a slight step up from spam, a qualified, interested job seeker has to work to get any attention.
There’s a big flaw in the mass mailing strategy. In order to mass mail a resume, it has to be very general. You can’t customize a resume for every job without spending time assessing the job. You can’t properly assess a job if you spend less than a minute (or a few seconds) on a submission.
Generic Resumes
After reading thousands of resumes, it becomes obvious which were customized and which were mass mailed. The generic resumes all say roughly the same thing. The details are different, but the style is clear. They have nothing personal to grab attention.
If you have never screened resumes, it may be tough to imagine how completely different resumes, in different formats and styles, can look exactly alike. Try this: read through the emails in your spam folder. There’s a wide range of styles, pitches and approaches. Despite the differences, you can probably spot a spam email without reading the entire subject.
Now, the mass mailed resumes aren’t quite as easy to pick out as the spam – the differences are more subtle. The reader, though, probably spends much of their time assessing resumes. They’re really good at it and can spot these subtle differences.
With so many resumes that look alike, it is essential to stand out. In marketing, standing out often means being controversial or flashy. In a job search, you can’t do either of these. Being controversial will alienate some of your prospects and flashy will often appear unprofessional.
The best way to stand out is to customize your resume so that the value you offer to the company is clear.
Customization
The solution is to customize your application. The more you customize your presentation, the more successful you will be.
Taken to the extreme, you would write a custom cover letter and resume for a position, address them to a specific individual, and hand deliver your information to the hiring manager – ideally with someone from the company referring and recommending you to the hiring manager. In this situation, your resume is going to get a very close look and you will get a response.
Unfortunately, this level of customization and personal contact isn’t always possible. So what should you do? Customize your sales pitch as much as possible.
There are two primary advantages to customizing your resume. First, you will emphasize the aspects of your background, skills and potential most valued by the company. A generic resume rarely provides a great degree of emphasis on any one area. A tailored resume, on the other hand, can focus the reader’s attention to a few select points that are highlighted throughout the resume. This can provide a much more compelling sales pitch.
The second advantage is that a customize resume will often be read more closely. By taking time to adapt your resume, and making clear you have invested time in this specific position, the hiring manager may be more willing to invest more of their time reviewing your background. This increased time might only be a few seconds. Although a few seconds doesn’t sound like much, it can be.
When resumes are first screened, they often will only get a very quick look, sometimes as little as 15-30 seconds. If you can encourage the reader to spend an extra 15 seconds reading your resume, you may have doubled the time they spend – and double the amount they learn about you before making a decision. Ideally, your best selling points are clear in the first 15 seconds. If they aren’t, you may get skipped over because the hiring manager assumes you don’t have a particular quality they want.