Stand out by following all the rules
SteveDisclaimer - I am not a recruiter, career coach, resume writer, and claim no expertise of any kind on the job search process. 
But something that I see and read quite a bit about that is related to the job search process makes me wonder. It is the seemingly standard resume advice that more or less goes like this:
1. Recruiters and HR staff will examine your resume for less than one minute before making a screening decision. I have even heard this is more like 30 seconds.
2. You should have a cover letter, but there is a pretty high likelihood no one will read it.
3. But in case someone reads it, it better offer a compelling reason for the Recruiter to read your resume. Except of course if the Recruiter follows the process that many of them seem to adopt, that is to head straight to the resume before reading the cover letter. So mostly the cover letter is intended to convince someone to do something they have already done.
It would be funny if the cover letter said something like: 'Thanks for reading my resume, you must have been impressed since you are now reading this cover letter. Let me tell you a bit more about how fabulous I am.'
4. But here is the one 'truism' that for some reason bothers me the most - the common advice to not do anything different, unusual, or out of the ordinary on the resume itself. No images, logos, strange or different colors or fonts. No cutting-edge design at all that might distract or annoy the hiring pro. Keep the the typical formula, plain white paper, two pages max, 10pt Times New Roman font, nice clean bullet points of your major accomplishments, etc.
In other words, make sure your resume looks exactly like every other one in the pile or in the recruiter's overstuffed e-mail inbox.
The Evil HR Lady wrote about this issue, referring to a online service called Vizual Resume that offers a collection of interesting and different templates for the creation of more distinctive resumes. Other similar services like VisualCV also offer options to create more visually appealing, engaging, and perhaps more compelling documents and testaments to someone's skills, background, and capabilities. And there is at least one iPhone App for resume building and transmitting.
Is the advice to genericize all the design elements of the resume the best to give and for job seekers to follow? In an incredibly difficult job market, where competition for positions in many fields and regions is historically high? Whatever you do candidate, don't do anything to make your resume stand out from anyone elses.
Sure, playing it safe with format, design, or interactive elements won't rule a candidate out in a competitive search process, but it won't make anyone's qualifications stand out from the rest either.
Am I way off the track on this? Maybe some real recruiting pros can set me straight as to why the standard advice seems to have the effect of making it all the more difficult to get noticed.
Why has the technical revolution that has impacted and dramatically changed almost every aspect of the workplace had such a difficult time disrupting the classic resume?
Reader Comments (10)
steve, you know i'm not a recruiter, career coach, or anything along these lines either. i'm also surprised by the recommendation to deliver a bland resume. that definitely wouldn't hold in the communication world, particularly for the design function. perhaps that's the point -- make your resume fit the mold for the job/function. and make it easy to scan and digest, whether that's by a human or a machine. i'm curious to see how others who do the job respond.
f
plain resume = boring! I'm an interactive recruiter and work with designers and developers all day. Call me biased, but their resumes rock...original & creative. I can see why your resume should fit the mold when looking for a corporate position, but even then, you should be able to stand out. Recently, hiring managers were polled, and one of the top attributes they look for in a candidate is creativity. So whether or not you're a designer, get creative.
@fran - Thanks - maybe since you and I actually don't have to deal with the demands of reviewing hundreds of resumes each day that we feel similarly about this.
@Meri - Such a great point about creativity. Even CEOs are espousing creativity as the most essential attribute of leadership. Love it and thanks for your comments.
Never been there, never done that, Steve. But in large companies it's all about the Applicant Tracking System, which has to scan, parse and extract the data from the resume and present the candidate electronically to the recruiter. Boring and standard is best for the ATS.
Ummmm - I look at it differently. The resume is part of the process but if the candidate is doing things the smart way they won't send a resume blindly but will tailor it to the specific job and make sure it's in the hands of the right person. I don't have a problem with the resume being standard for those occasions when an ATS is the target but it should speak specifically about the role, your experience and most importantly what you can do for the company/person and the benefits you bring, not a catalog of the features showing where you have been. I think in the grand scheme of things resumes become strike out not strike in documents more often than not.
as a television producer who constantly had to recruit part time staff fot a range of positions, I did read cover letters, and I read them first. both the content and the style told me quite a bit about the person, often more than the resume itself. what I was looking for, among other things -- ability to construct a coherent sentence and a coherent letter, and evidence that they'd thought a bit about the work for which they were applying and what they could bring to it.
As the head of HR at an ad agency, I am always looking for unique design, witty ways to describe previous work experience and an infusion of the candidate's personality. I also put high emphasis on grammar and spelling - if they can't get it right on their resume, how are they going to get it right for our clients? I'm amazed at the number of boring resumes I get and especially annoyed by the ones I get via email named, "Resume" or even worse, "Resume Template." C'mon people, it's your first, and possibly, only chance to impress me! Go for it!
Completely agree--bland is boring and conveys exactly what most candidates don't want to convey--that they're like everyone else. However, I have yet to see an alternative format that isn't going to aggravate the HR folks who do only have 30 seconds to glance at resumes. If they're using a standard format, the info is where it's expacted to be. If it's in an innovative format, a HR person has to search for what they need to know--never a good thing.
So while I hear lots of talk about how the resume shouldn't be boring and blend in, I've yet to see much in the way of alternatives offered up. The two sites in the post above are good examples, but most seem a bit more ambitious than an individual job seeker could do.
Any suggestions for where to find innovative examples that could be created in-house?
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