10 Tips from Recruiters to Get & Keep You in the Job Search Game
By Gina Arinyanontakoon and Lisa Vitale
As if the recession wasn’t tough enough, now job seekers have a jobless recovery to endure. And while “jobless” may be an exaggeration, today’s slightly improved employment numbers have only increased, rather than relieved, the competition in the job market. It appears that people who gave up searching for jobs in recent years are now willing to give it another shot. More resumes are flowing in for every opportunity and more interview candidates are squeezing into every reception area.
You might imagine, with the increased competition and limited opportunities, that job seekers today would present a pristine resume and sharp interviewing skills. Not so. The fact is, the majority of job seekers—even experienced ones—still make fatal flaws in these early phases of the job search cycle.
As two recruiters who interview thousands of professionals seeking jobs each year, and review 50 times as many resumes, we understand the pressure you are under and the competition you face. To give you an informed edge in the job search process, we are happy to share with you our top 10 tips for resume and interview success. Use these guidelines wisely and you will elevate yourself high above today’s crowds of job seekers. Trust us—we have seen firsthand what you are up against!
10 Insider Tips for Job Search Success
Resume Tips:
1. Perfect Your Resume Grammar – It’s more unusual today to come across a resume that is free of grammar errors than one with them. So make your resume one of the precious few without grammatical flaws and you will certainly get a jaded recruiter to take notice.
Avoid grammar issues by enlisting a team of proofreaders. Use friends and family but also try to get an industry peer or mentor to read through it. Check to make sure you are spelling and capitalizing technologies correctly. No one will believe you are an expert in SPSS® Statistics 18 or Articulate Studio ‘09 if you can’t spell them.
It also helps to read your resume backwards line by line. Why? Because your mind stops reading a text once you are overly familiar with it. By reading a document backwards you can trick your mind into focusing again and picking up the little errors you weren’t previously catching.
2. Use Job-specific Examples – Take a few minutes to tailor experience listed at previous jobs on your resume to the position to which you are applying. This simply means modifying the experience you list under each previous position to demonstrate skills and knowledge you would use in the new job. While this minor adjusting might not work for every prior job, you will be surprised to see how you can better align yourself as a job candidate to the role. You are helping recruiters see how years of experience have cultivated you for their opportunities. Chances are they will thank you with an interview request.
3. Add Skills and Accomplishments Sections – We recruiters are notorious skimmers. We do not read every line of a resume but tend to hunt for the information we need. To ensure your skills and big achievements are not overlooked, add sections dedicated to these areas. Skills sections should focus on technologies you are proficient in, language skills and any abilities required for your specific profession. If you have notable accomplishments (awards, publications, etc.) create an accomplishments section as well. Don’t let your resume get tossed to the wayside because recruiters were unable to hunt and peck to find all your talents, skills and successes. Display them proudly and prominently.
4. Keep the Length Reasonable – Unless you’re Neil Armstrong or Hillary Clinton, there is no reason your resume should be more than a few pages long—three at the very most but two is still ideal. It’s good to be proud of what you have accomplished but if those accomplishments are from your high school and college years, let them go and focus on more current experience. (Obviously, if you’re a new grad in your early twenties, you’ll want to include those years to represent the sum total of your work experience.) You can keep your resume more succinct by choosing which four to five recent roles to highlight in detail (with bulleted experience) and using only key data, such as employer, years employed and role, for other, older jobs.
5. Keep the Design Clean – Recruiters love a streamlined resume in terms of design. This does not mean your resume must replicate high art, but that the design should allow the eye to flow easily along the page, it should distinguish key sections and it should look clean and organized. Leverage your proofreading team to find out how clean your resume looks and to help you watch for the warning signs of a messy document: more than two fonts, a myriad of headlines and no clear margins or sections.
Interview Tips:
6. Make Eye Contact – While this may sound like a skill learned in kindergarten, many, many interviewees forget the importance of making eye contact during the interview. If direct eye contact makes you nervous, simply direct your gaze slightly above the eyes (such as eyebrow and forehead region). And eye contact is just the start of good body language. Remember a strong handshake and confident posture are also essential in telling the interviewer you are smart, engaged and competent.
7. Prepare, then Prepare Some More – Go into the interview informed. Learn about the employer and get all the knowledge you can about the position before you enter the interview room. You can do this by asking for more insight directly from the hiring manager, getting insight from a peer or colleague in the company and doing some good Internet research. The knowledge you gain will allow you to ask interesting, informed questions during the interview and help you tailor your responses directly to things you know about the job. We recruiters are always impressed with candidates who do their homework. It shows that you are self-reliant and ready to work hard.
In addition, you should arrive at the interview with your work samples ready for review. You should be able to flip through them—in a portfolio or on your computer—with ease and expertise right in front of the interviewer. If you are scrambling to find the right example, you come across as disorganized. Remember, being perceived as “disorganized” is never a good impression for a job candidate to leave.
8. Answer Questions with the Job in Mind – Rather than simply answering each question the recruiter throws at you, take a moment to think and ask yourself this: “What does this question have to do with the job?” In most cases it will be obvious, but you always want to keep in mind that the interviewer is looking for specific information from you. Do your best to try and relate your responses to the job in question and the work they will want from you. And don’t be afraid to ask. If you are not sure about a question say this: “That’s an interesting question and I hope I answered it well. How does it relate to the Program Development position itself?” You might get the interviewer to tell you more so you can better address their concerns and/or questions.
9. Sit Up and Engage – Interviews can feel long and stressful but don’t let your interviewer know it. It’s important to stay cool, not fidget and never check your watch. If you are bored, fight the urge to slouch or fiddle. You may have decided that the opportunity is not right for you, but not taking the interview seriously could come back to haunt you. Remember, recruiters and hiring managers have wide networks that extend far into your industry. Even if the interview doesn’t work out, being professional in the interview mitigates the risk of others hearing anything negative.
10. Groom Yourself for Success – Appearances matter, it’s a fact. Unruly hair, unshaven faces and disheveled clothes are all warning signs to a recruiter that the candidate is not serious about the job.
At CARA, we were recently surprised to hear that a high-performing training consultant fared poorly in an interview. The problem? She wore lots and lots of perfume. The scent was so intense it distracted the interviewer who had a difficult time focusing on the interview. Needless to say, if you are interviewing for a project/job, everything needs to be toned down: perfume, jewelry and dress.
The “Keep-it-Simple and Clean” rule applies here. If you have outgrowth, get rid of it before the interview. Stubble? Shave it? Beat up fingernails and hands? Try a manicure. Wrinkled clothes? Iron or dry clean them. Show up looking sharp and you will not only look better, you will feel better.
Searching for the right job is hard work and it’s easy for today’s job seekers to get discouraged. That’s why we counsel candidates to treat the job search process itself like a career. Prepare, dress professionally, work hard and take the process seriously. The more committed and professional you are in the job hunt, the more quickly you will be identified as a hard worker worth hiring.
Do you have any specific resume or interview questions for our recruiting team? Send us your toughest questions and we will answer them here.
