Resumes

When reviewing a resume in consideration for a position, what are some of the most important key areas you look for in a resume to help you decide, yes - no - maybe?

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Permalink Reply by Amy on March 22, 2010 at 8:29pm

Consistency/Flaws: Is their title VP of IT but one of their duties is 1st level helpdesk support? Red flag! Is the format of their resume messy and distracted with misspellings and grammar mistakes? That person is automatically eliminated for jobs requiring organization and attention to detail!

Career Progression: Did they go from Jr Developer to Developer to Sr Developer... or from Architect to Developer to Team Lead to Developer, etc. Titles aren't the most important thing, duties are.

Details! Do they just have a company and title? Have they put time into describing their duties or just put down the most generic description of a database administrator? Are there dates of employment? Watch out for a lot of 2005-2006, 2006-2007... this might only be a few months over the new year. The less details they include, the more likely they are to be hiding something.

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Permalink Reply by Emily on March 22, 2010 at 11:10pm

Thank you Amy for your reply. I absolutely agree with your three key elements and would add a .... resume to job match statement - for lack of a better term.

I am not a fan of objective statements unless you can quantify for me in your statement how your skills, abilities, and experiences are a match to what the job specs are requiring. Very few people can successfully do this. Most job seekers make the mistake of using templates and generic objective statements which tell me absolutely nothing about therr skills; so these resumes end up in the NO pile. It can make the difference between the YES pile and the NO pile. Do you agree?

Amy Walz said:

Consistency/Flaws: Is their title VP of IT but one of their duties is 1st level helpdesk support? Red flag! Is the format of their resume messy and distracted with misspellings and grammar mistakes? That person is automatically eliminated for jobs requiring organization and attention to detail!

Career Progression: Did they go from Jr Developer to Developer to Sr Developer... or from Architect to Developer to Team Lead to Developer, etc. Titles aren't the most important thing, duties are.

Details! Do they just have a company and title? Have they put time into describing their duties or just put down the most generic description of a database administrator? Are there dates of employment? Watch out for a lot of 2005-2006, 2006-2007... this might only be a few months over the new year. The less details they include, the more likely they are to be hiding something.