Read any
interesting résumés lately? Must
depends on whom you ask. The one universal truth about résumés is that everyone
has an opinion. At one end of the continuum, the résumé is an ego-trip, and at
the opposite end, it’s viewed as a royal pain. Most view résumés as an
unavoidable evil.
The popular buzz
– no matter where you stand on the topic – is that you must include the “right” buzzwords. As a professional résumé guru, I
can attest that there is a little alchemy involved. While including a few key
words in your material carries value, that perceived value is often exaggerated.
For those who
work, fiddle or otherwise handle résumés daily, or perhaps on a regular basis, seeing
the same key words, usually dubbed as buzzwords,
does not universally communicate the user’s intended message. Many people think
that if you include all the right buzzword phraseology, it makes your résumé
automatically standout. –Au contraire.
Short back-story: In the last two weeks, no less
than six résumés arrived, all of which dealt with different occupations. Of
those six, three individuals managed to include every single buzzword
associated with their particular occupation. For example, one of those résumés
involved the field of education. There are 30 well-known key words popularly
associated with education, and the job seeker had included every one of them at
least once or multiple times.
For that unemployed
teacher, the use of every occupational buzzword failed to produce the desired results.
The individual wanted to know why. Intuition told me the individual had
overplayed the hand. To manipulate and inculcated the use of every known
buzzword required four pages of text. To reduce the length, it required
reducing the font size to 10 point, which in turn, made the material more
difficult to read.
Bottom line: Employers
were not reading the job seeker’s lengthy ad.
Make no mistake
about this: Résumés in our post-modern era are a euphemism for a 15-second ad. If that ad requires the
average decision-maker to invest more than 15 seconds to grasp what it is an
individual has to offer, the potential job candidate is dead in the water. That
too, is the bottom line.
The exception,
of course, is when a job candidate is the sole individual being considered for
a position. Under those circumstances, ad length and buzzwords are immaterial.
The fix is in, and the story, hopes and aspirations for everyone else has
ended.
Quick last story
and I’ll stop bending your ear: Last year, a school superintendent came to see
me, carrying a five-page résumé. He had a hot job lead from a friend who sat on
another district’s school board.
His friend told
him to “Get your résumé in by Friday. That’s when we are making our decision.
Oh, and by the way, make sure to keep it to one page. Personally, I don’t care
how long it is, because I know you. It’s the other board members. They’re busy,
and refuse to read more than one page.”
We managed to
keep his hard-hitting ad to one page, using 10 buzzwords, and it worked.