What To Look For In A Resume

With dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of replies to a job placement advertisement, you or the person designated to assess/study the resumes will need to pay careful attention to the information in each  application.  From the resumes you will gain your first impression of your applicants’ qualifications, skills and abilities. The information that is ‘not there’ is just as important as the information that is included.

It is important to note that the way resumes are written and presented can reveal a great deal about your applicants.  For instance, how they addressed all the criteria asked for, their spelling and grammar, style and presentation all give clues as to their competency, abilities and level of education.

Some important things to keep in mind……

Presentation
·    Needs to be cleanly and neatly printed on high quality paper
·    It should be obvious that a lot of time and effort was spent in building the resume
·    Layout should be professional and uncluttered and have adequate white spacing
·    Have bullet points, bold or italic fonts and/or indented paragraphs
·    Important information should be easy to find without having to search through the whole document

Content
·    Typing, spelling or grammar mistakes
·    Objectives and/or goals. Are they in line with yours?
·    Educational qualifications
·    Similar job experience to the one being applied for
·    Volunteer experience
·    Inclusion of useful and/or transferrable skills and knowledge or qualifications
·    Action verbs such as; supervised, managed, organised, achieved, initiative etc
·    Any significant achievements in their previous employment

With a large number of applications to consider, those who are savvy and want to grab your attention will place their most important/relevant information early in the first part of the resume.

Many employers will only consider applicants who have had similar experience in a previous job.  We say give equal consideration to those applicants with excellent transferrable skills and abilities….they could even be more suitable.

Watch out for everything from just a little bit of truth stretching to outright lies and fraud.

Everyone wants to present themselves in the best possible light by using a little spin and they will also leave out information that they feel may prejudice their application such as race, religion, gender, marital status and age. Information of this nature is not generally considered to be relevant to employment.  And to a certain extent employers invite this type of spin by their own set of expectations and prejudices.

However, the number of outright lies being told on resumes is becoming increasingly common.  The most common lie will be stretching the dates of employment to hide periods of unemployment.  Some people will say that they were paid a higher salary at a previous job to get more money from a new employer.  And there are other far more serious lies such as inventing University degree qualifications and previous employment positions

For further advice on how to assess resumes and identify top performers using Harrison Assessments in a more objective way, contact James Bryden, The Productivity Coach on 0421 210 444 or leave a comment below.