My company Comcate is hiring for a youthful inside sales person.
For fun, I aliased myself on the email address resumes are sent in to. It’s shocking how poor some people’s career skills are.
Every time I see articles about "How to prepare and send your resume" I think: "Ugh, how many of these articles need to be written? There must be a million such articles and books."
But apparently people aren’t reading them. So far I’ve seen:
- Cover letter – body of the email with resume attachment – is first impression. Yet, people just say "See my resume attached." Huge missed opportunity.
- Attachment – "resume_feb06.doc" is also a missed opportunity to brand your name. It also shows that you’ve been looking for a job for so long that you need to re-name it each month. How about: "Ben_Casnocha_Resume_for_Comcate.doc". Makes it easier for employer to organize.
- Grasp of English – it’s important for people to show strong writing skills, yet when the first sentence is "to whom it may concern: please find my resume attached And i look forward to talking with you soon and Thank You very much for your time and Your consideration" it makes my eyes glaze over.
The best one I’ve seen is where someone included a personal testimonial at the top of the resume, such as "John Doe is an excellent sales executive with experience doing XYZ." Even though I’ve never heard of the quoter, it instantly provides credibility since it’s "objective" and encourages me to read on.
You just have to love those resumes that come in with the obligatory clauses of “Excellent verbal and written skills” and “Excellent attention to detail” while the resume is riddled with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, poor use of punctuation, etc.
You can immediately tell what portions of the resume were cut-and-pasted from a template vs. what the candidate wrote themselves.
… and people whine about how hard it is to get a job? Man.
I couldn’t agree more. I used a template 2 years ago and the difference in enthusiasm of replies is quite noticeable – one more tip to add.
If you aren’t sending your resume out 100 times then editing it to add more pertainant information for that particular job possibility is good practice. It’s similar to researching before the interview.