You’d think that with all of the resume products my company sells that I’d advocate the use of them. Well, I don’t. They’re not much good for the hiring manager, and they’re certainly no good for candidates. There’s always a better way to get the job.
I tried to share this insight with my daughter a while back and got nowhere, thus continuing a cycle of me providing free advice and her considering it worth the value paid – a cycle, by the way, which began on her 12th birthday- that intensely metamorphical day in the life of the human female when her father goes from being God to being mud all seemingly in the space of 24 hours. Ahh….the joys of fatherhood.
Where was I? Oh yes, resumes! She sent them out – dozens and dozens. After several weeks, and this could be just wishful thinking on my part, it started to sink in. “So, any luck with those resumes you sent out?” I asked. “All they say is that they have my resume on file and when they do have an opening…,” she responded. You know the story. Wasn’t it Mark Twain who quipped that he was amazed how between the ages of 16 and 21 his Dad seemed to get so much smarter?
I also tried to share my no-resume wisdom with a recruiter recently. We’re actively recruiting, and he wanted a job description and keywords. I told him I could do searches on Dice and Monster just fine myself, that I wanted someone he knew to be passionate about computers. “We have thousands of resumes in our private database, I’ll send you over a few,” he says. Hello!?
A few years back, an ace recruiter in New York got my mind right on resumes. “Gregg, you don’t get it!” she said, as I dared show her my ultra nifty, super-combo resume search and email feature. “Put that computer away,” she said with a dismissive wave reminiscent of Miranda Priestly in the movie, The Devil Wears Prada. “It’s my job to find my client a great candidate, not submit resumes.”
The better way to get a job, of course, is to network. Everybody knows somebody who needs help. Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, the candidate crunch is in full swing. Retirement, restricted immigration, a sustained economic recovery – nearly every macro-economic factor out there is pushing us further into a skilled labor shortage.
