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.
Explanation. I am a techie. I put things like programming languages, operating systems, and other things I know companies look for in bullet points. I also worked as a programmer writer and put some skills companies look for in bullet points. It works.
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.
Every bit of advice I got on this was to write a 1-2 sentence abstract of you as a candidate (not the “objective” section that comes up in old advice), with an *extremely* clear mapping to the posted role. Underneath, have 4-6 bullets, 2 col, with key skills also from the req. The rest as normal.
Yeah, I think the main point to impress is that keywords matter more than ever and cold internal recs are the new table stakes (active advocacy from your internal contact needed to stand out, at least in tech).
In anything. I managed editorial in Avery large company. Algorithm sent me people who would be right for my managing editor role. We were required to interview referrals from employees. They sent me the people I hired.
Enlist the aid and guidance of the relevant career centers at the schools where you teach. Partner with them on a résumé writing assignment or run a workshop with them. Even though they're prob under resourced, they'll likely be happy to help and may surprise.
Good idea. I've done that when I teach in-person. This is an asynchronous online course, but maybe I could get them top record a tutorial for the fall class. I'm very grateful for all of these suggestions, and I'll be tweaking my current resume assignment based ion them.
Coming off the COVID lockdowns, many career centers have better capacity for supporting students via online and asynchronous tools. I hope you've got good partners to work with. Feel free to message me if I can help.
Language models are excellent at generating keywords that language models find credible.
You can also screen yourself on candidate tracking systems. Text parsing glitches are an easy but essential fix, for example.
