Students, and parents, employers and professors: take note.
“The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won't use keywords." www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/o...
Honest question: does that seem to be successful? I teach business writing courses and this is something I am sincerely grappling with right now when I teach resume design.
Resumes should always be optimized to make it as easy for the person evaluating it as possible to move it on to the next step.
Mine is:
- 1-2 summary sentence
- list of relevant skills for the job
- list of my accomplishments that are transferrable to the job
Then job history and education
As someone who has had to hire candidates from start to finish in the past, it's exhausting to go through hundreds of resumes and try to hunt for if they're qualified. It's human nature to just start skimming for the important bits - teach your kids to put that all up front.
This is really helpful. Many of my students are non-traditional with up to 20 years of military experience. The military-style resume is not optimal and takes a lot of unlearning, so I’ll definitely emphasize this approach.
It's like when you look up a recipe online and you have to scroll through a story, click on a button and close out an ad in order to get to the actual thing you want... and then do that for hours.
After 4 hours you're begging for people to give you a quick reason to put them into the next stage.
The other advice I have is for people to not underestimate the power of their network or even a cold call to put in a good word.
My first job, the head of my program asked if he called and put in a good word. When I got the job, they said it impressed them that he stuck his neck out for me.
My current job I had so many people who were connected to the hiring manager in one way or another (6-8 total) that when he called me he said it was because he'd had so many people tell him he'd be crazy not to reach out.
