Resume

Resume. See also Curriculum Vitae.

One size fits all doesn't cut it anymore in a competitive marketplace. You have to customise your résumé for each job advertisement you're applying for.

Each employer is looking for specific skills which you have to demonstrate. Unsubstantiated claims may cause your application to be discarded.

The irony is that people like Bill Gates may never get hired by today’s Microsoft because candidates profiling is very unkind to an entrepreneurial spirit.

Recruitment agencies are trained to look for the negatives in order to thin down a pile of 50 or 100 applicants to a short list of 5 or 10. The lack of a particular keyword will cause you to be classified as ‘sub-prime’.

The original résumé format as a chronological employment history is fine if you’re only been 5 years in the workplace but as you advance in maturity some gaps and changes of direction will appear. This type of résumé will expose you bare like through a police interrogation. What you want instead is something that puts your best foot forward to arouse the employer’s interest and be called for an interview.

There comes Résumé Digest[1]. It is a tool that takes your historical employment history, assigns keywords to each position you’ve held and produces a more suitable sales brochure of yourself. Recruiters use software to build databases of résumés and pull up candidates with a given profile if they can. It’s about time candidates also catch up with technology and use it to their advantage.

We’ve not talking about lying or fudging things because you will get undone at the interview if you do. But it is your best interest to prioritise your work experience and highlight key skills in a way that makes you the wanted one rather than the discarded one.

Recruiters are flooded with half baked applications which don’t stand a chance of making it to the shortlist because people didn’t bother to match their skills with what the employer was after.

• Résumé Digest