Is Your Resume and Cover Letter Ending Up In The Trash?
Sometimes What You Leave Out of Your Resume Is More Important Than What You Include
There’s an old saying that says, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Unfortunately this adage is very relevant to writing resumes and cover letters. Over the years you’ve probably been told to add anything and everything that shows what a great citizen you are. Perhaps you’ve been told to add a section at the bottom of your resume detailing your volunteer affiliations, hobbies or groups you’re a member of. Doing so can immediately put your resume in the garbage.
Why would showing your civic or volunteer pride ruin your chances of getting a job interview? One word…litigation! You see, for Human Resources managers, keeping the company from getting sued is job #1. Hiring a stellar candidate for the position comes in at a distant second place.
Resumes that reveal volunteer affiliations, hobbies, interests or memberships in groups that reveal such prohibited information as religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or age are magnets for potential future lawsuits. Companies do not need to know nor should they know any of these things about you.
For example, a resume may reveal that a person does volunteer work for a church or belongs to a group that is clearly associated with a particular race or nationality.
The Federal EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) and the state equivalents specifically state that an employer is prohibited from obtaining or using such information. If a company has this information in their files in the form of a resume,it could come back and haunt them should the employer ever become the subject of civil litigation or a government investigation into their hiring practices.
So guess what an HR manager will do as SOON as they see that you’ve added information that could potentially get them sued? It ends up in the trash. So regardless of how much relevant experience you have or how much money you spent on a professional resume writer to create a masterpiece for you….it WILL end up in the trash.
*Question of the Week*
Question: After staying home with my autistic son for a few years I’ve been trying to get back into the work force but the large gap in my employment is killing me! I’ve sent my resume out to dozens of companies and I’m getting no responses. What’s going on?
Answer: I haven’t seen your resume or the cover letters that you’re using so I’m going to have to base my answer assuming that you are indeed qualified for the job and that your resume and cover letter are well written.
The best way for me to answer this is to share with you a story that an HR Manager told me. He related to me how one time he had an amazing candidate interview with him for a mid level management position paying $75,000 per year. The candidate’s background was perfectly matched for the position and she was articulate, presented well and breezed through three rounds of interviews to make it to the final three being considered for the position.
The HR manager told me that despite her being the best candidate of the three she wasn’t given the job offer. When I enquired as to why, he responded by saying that during the third interview, she mentioned that she had a special needs child at home but he was in school now so she was up to the challenge of being employed full time once again.
His past history of people with children in general was that they often took more time off then their childless counterparts. The final nail in her coffin was when somehow during the interview she mentioned being a single mom. At that point she was “dead in the water”, since visions of her having to miss work or having to leave early were all that the hiring manager could think of from that point on.
Was what they did illegal? Absolutely, but hiring decisions like this are made every single day. DON’T ever give someone any information that can give them a reason to rule you out.
So how do you navigate this minefield? Well the less you say the better. An executive recruiter colleague of mine told his candidate to explain her employment gap by saying that she took time off to take care of “Uncle Charlie,” a fictional relative that had a terminal illness and had no one else to care for him. Once he’d “passed on” she was ready to get back to work full time. The truth of the matter was that she’d been a stay at home mom until her child was old enough to go to pre-school. And yes, she got the job
For more great information to help you outsmart and out-maneuver your competition for the job head to Fake Resume
Text resumes will be around for a long time. Because everyone can type.
But everyone cannot write a story or a poem.
So, there will also be a demand for expert / professional resume – writers, for a long time to come.
But with thousands of ( often well-written ) resumes flooding the mail-boxes of recruiters, even these get ” deleted ” without being opened !
Ever-increasing number of recruiters feel that graphical / visual / audio resumes have an edge over plain text resumes – prompting Human-Resource managers to patronize path-breaking job-portals such as
http://www.VisualCV.com
which inspired me to come-up with my own innovative portal
http://www.CustomizeResume.com
( it is easy to be inspired, but , at the age of 77 , difficult to implement ! )
With regards
hemen parekh
hcp@RecruitGuru.com
Mumbai — India
Hello, I have browsed most of your posts. This page is probably where I got the most useful information for my information gathering. Thanks for posting, maybe we can see more on this. Are you aware of any other websites on this subject