I recently had a rare insight into a hiring manager’s mind.I was revamping my resume and asked a hiring manager I was acquainted with for help,thinking I’d able to learn what HM expect from a resume.
His comments went something like this:
“Put in as many dates as possible.We need them!”
“Margins should be wider”
“Title sections should be undescored;yours are only bolded”.
“Is that font Arial? (it was Bookman Old Style,quite Arial-like).Change it to Arial.No fancy fonts”.
“Why do you say your knowledge of German is “medium”?.Just say is great!Who will find you out?Nobody speaks German anyway”.(Same comments re the technical skills section).
And the last straw:
Him:”Are the items in this list well aligned?”.
Me:”Of course they are.The text processor aligned them for me,you know”.
Him:”They don’t look aligned to me”.
Me:”Look,the printed copy is picture-perfect.It doesn’t look good on screen because my monitor is cheap and quite distortes things.Why don’t we just leave anecdotal details for later?”
Him (hurt):”Format is not anecdotal!” Then he sat at my PC and began hitting the backspace and space bar till the items looked aligned to him .(They actually described a very nice curve).
I felt dismayed.Remember,he was a HIRING MANAGER.Is that the actual way HR sift through resumes?
Just for the record ,my original resume (minus this manager’s “improvements”) landed me a job 2 weeks afterward.
