Discussion on:

What hiring managers hate about your resume

But at most places the technical types won't see a cv until several non tech types have 'understood' it.

In the UK that would be the recruitment consultant (pimp) at least, sometimes HR as well.

Very hard to target if you don't know your audience.

You might see that this guy did two years with MySQL and we are considering a move, whereas the HR type thinks he can't spell.

I have come accross resumes that have passport pictures attached to it. Does this improve the chances of the applicant? And why are we not called in for what we can do and not the paper itself

with an airline.

They wanted a photo so they didn't interview people with a pink mohican, 666 tattooed on their brow and a large quantity of steel embedded in their face.

He was OK on this, his hair was blue.

Very true and something I didn't know is the your emotional tone of the resume, hmm I have to think that resume writing and interviews can be judged based on the hiring managers personality style.

You may be a excellent resume writer I mean a 10 but you turn off the manager who is reading it because he doesn't believe your skills.

How do you cater to every manager one resume fits all, or a variety of resumes for a variety of critics?

Good 101 in resume do not do lists!

I am a hiring manager and I am sick of resumes that are too brief - that do not sufficiently cover what you've done in your (especially most recent) positions. You can list "Java" in some skills list but if I don't see detailed work activity to back that up I'm not going to call you (a headhunter probably would, but...)

Do: pare down older positions, I'm probably not hiring on the basis of older tech skills.
Don't: eliminate them entirely or leave "blank spots". Older domain experience is entirely relevant. Don't omit education just because it's old either.

Do: Sum up your most relevant skills/experience in the first half page to make it clear to me how you're relevant to this job.
Don't: then omit a chronological work history that fully explains your positions and all their duties for at least the last three years.

Don't: Put technologies or buzzwords on a resume that you won't know what they are when I ask you about them. That's an automatic disqualification.

When I post a job I'll get 100 resumes. Most of them (90%) are clearly crap. The 10% that are relevant do get a complete read - first a full scan and then, assuming formatting, organization, typos, etc. didn't turn me off, a complete read. When hiring someone for my team, I take it very seriously as the right person can make or break an organization, and I suspect other real hiring managers out there do too. I don't phone screen on a lark, I want clear evidence from the resume that there's value in talking to you.

For the same reason I don't let HR pre-screen my resumes; I'm not sure what the added value is supposed to be other than not taking my time to glance at the other 90 resumes, but IMO it takes more time to manage the process than to do it myself, and then I know I've interviewed the right people...

I've got 28 years of computing experience, 15 years as a SQL developer and DBA, I've run over 200 staff but I have to compete with upstarts with 3-4 years of experience. How can I fit my experience into 2 pages? It's a parlous state when recruiters aren't willing to read to earn the huge amounts they earn, to do so little. I've not yet met a hiring manage who totally understood the role they were trying to fill.
My experience puts hiring managers in the same class as mobile phone and used car salesmen with morals slightly less decent than those of a prostitute.

Old Macka

I dare say that 90% of all job postings have grammatical flaws and are exceedingly vague.

I???ve read job duties that have nothing to do with the job title.

How many good candidates have skipped a posting because it was hilariously written by someone who obviously had no idea what the job was all about? Acronyms with the letters switched around. Certification requirements from institutions that don???t even issue the cert mentioned.

Always make sure the posting is correct, specific, and professional.

Hiring people get what they inspire in the candidate.

When you ask for all of the things that you want in a candidate that go beyond reasonable.

The list includes technology pushed to the limit of its existence or beyond. Such as having DB2 experience prior to 1982 or even 1978 which was named System Relational, or System R.

Combining job positions, such as java developer/COBOL legacy developer, into one title position.

Asking for more years of experience for a minimum than what fits the job title. Such as a Mainframe Programmer II with 10+ years, where the title is only a 2-4 years of experience minimum.

Asking for a senior position at a extremely low or non-existent base salary offer. Or a salary history or requirement. Such as an offer of for a Senior Mainframe Programmer of $45K-55K in a market value of 70+K(10 percentile) to117+K (90 percentile).

So what does DOE mean? Don?t Offer Experience a fair salary?

It use to be, for me, no problem of getting a job. And I still have recruiters offering me jobs - but as mentioned above. I?m looking for a long term job not some wimpy 3 week to 9+ month job. Especially when the recruiters don?t even read my resume of being a FTE (full time employee).

The other main thing that seems to be going on in the background, in some cases, is there is a candidate already in mind. And you don?t have a chance due to favoritism/nepotism.

Not asking for interviews with military or community service experience. If you don?t care for the people who care about you, it makes your job harder.

I have well over 24 years in IT. I took my 5 page resume (comes from contracting) and shorten it to down 2 pages. Hasn?t seemed to help me. I do have some gaps in my resume. Duh, they are non-IT and in between jobs. Ask, I?ll tell you what they were. Enthusiastic - is relative. Ask this simple question. Do you like your job or do you like what you do (overall)? Followed by - What would you do to change it or grow in your career? For that matter - does a resume show community service? If it does.... ding ding ding.

For those that are also unaware, if you work for the State/City/County. Salary is not always the tallest thing you look for. This is a community service. Ding, ding, ding. You could/should be offering these people double/triple/quadruple the amount they are making now. It would still should be within the normal salary range of the job title.

What if your explanations, though brief, for the gaps in your working life, throw it over 2 pages? What if your jobs and qualifications list exceeds 2 pages?

Maybe the problems are more to do with having a generic resume to submit to all jobs, instead of tailoring an application to directly address that you have the skills & experience requested on the job advertisement - then the hiring people know right away if you at least have covered the essentials they are looking for.
That'd enable the applicants to be sorted according to who fits the criteria, and then their second, more generalised wordy CV wouldn't be such a chore to read through.

Another concern - what if you try to fit a convention with your CV and in so doing are looked over by companies & employers that don't do things by the book - and those are exactly the types of places you'd prefer to work in. True, you can float more than one resume on a job database; given the varied preferences in presentation that is likely a good solution.
If they all use online databases.

After over 20 years in IT, I've been looking to get back to work after a medical problem which was the reason I left my last job; and spent last year having several operations, before getting my OK in April.

So, I have a 'valid' reason for being out of work for a period of time....

But, after speaking to a couple of recruitment agencies here in the UK, whilst my health is fine now, my situation is not!

It seems because of this 'outage', my CV is just not worth them putting it forward! They would prefer to put forward people who are in work and looking! The person told me 'off record' anything over a six month gap and they will not look at it. Makes you wonder about people on maternity leave.

This was not just a one off from a small outfit, but from one of the largest agencies. I've been in situations where I can't even get some of the agencies to return my calls.

After a 13 year career I stayed at home with the kids for 8 years!

Granted many people would not speak to me, and many recruiters would not present me, but I still had good references and found a really good position. I just had my 9 month anniversary.

Don't let them get you down - you must sell yourself!! Good Luck!

Larger corporate agencies are more likely to have arbitrary rules that will end up disqualifying you if you don't fit into the fat part of the bell curve. Seek out the smaller agencies that aren't public corporations; they're more likely to make exceptions, because they're less likely to suffer under the kind of bureaucratic overhead that prohibits a personal touch.

I don't know if this has happened to anyone who has posted. But, there's one employer that I on a regular basis apply for open positions with. When you log in to your account on the HR website, find an open position and you apply...so far so good. Then, you get to the part where you either use the copy of your resume that you may have uploaded at an earlier time, upload your resume at the current time of applying for the position or you can copy & paste it in. So far so good. The problem is this.

The system allows you to review your resume before applying it to the application. The resume is is converted to a PDF file because it's shown on-screen. For the life of me, I can not figure out why my resume comes out all jacked up! On the first page after the the biographical info, there is enough whitespace to where the beginning of my resume is at the bottom of the page: approx. 3 lines. Ok, so I thought it was my formatting of my resume: a Word document not in one of the pre-formatted Word resume styles. SO, I tweaked the resume a little. Tried again, same thing. Ok, so I tried uploading my resume as a Word Rich Text file, versus a straight Word file; Same thing. Copy & paste directly, same thing.

It makes you wonder if the hiring managers realize that the systems has a serious flaw or not. On second thought, I think they do, because whenever I've had an interview, they would ask me for a copy of my resume during the interview; with that employer, I always take at least 4 copies of my resume because of knowing how my resume shows up. So, the problem must be in the HR end of it. So, one could assume that with the resumes being uploaded are being screwed by the system and an HR person looking at the resume and automatically dismissing it and thinking that the applicant is is the reason for the resume looking bad.