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Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

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31–40 of 83 posts

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#31
post #19

Does anyone have some examples of resumes they've used successfully; or from the hiring side, resumes that stood out to them? Anyone A/B testing their resumes?

As current student trying to come up with a good resume at the moment, this would be extremely useful.

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#32

Surprisingly, I have the opposite trouble: how do I stop recruiters trying to recruit me? I have about 15-20 recruiters contacting me per week however what I put it down to is: 1. Location. Since I moved to SF the job offers have increased substantially . 2. Skill set. Fortunately I'm skilled in some "popular" languages. 3. Years of experience. I'm in the "hot spot" - not too old, and not too young (sorry - it does s…

I'm in a similar boat. I'm not "senior", but I am skilled and have plenty of experience with a successful start-up and a top digital agency AND I am skilled in multiple languages/platforms. I constantly get calls, emails and stalked on Twitter and LinkedIn by recruiters. It's a real hassle...

However, now I am on the market (at the worst possible time of the year). Logically, a recruiter would be the best person to go to for work, but my relationship with recruiters is tainted, and it appears that there are a lot of good companies that simply won't deal with them.

Christmas isn't the best time to be looking for jobs, but even following all the rules won't necessarily get you noticed.

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#33
post #30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny in my part of the world, the bad ones are the private universities. The reason being the only people that go to private universities are the ones without good notes to earn a place at the public universities, but whose parents are rich enough to pay for the university. People with degrees from private universities are told they bought the degree.

What part of the world is that?

Portugal, and most of the mainland European countries.

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#34

Surprisingly, I have the opposite trouble: how do I stop recruiters trying to recruit me? I have about 15-20 recruiters contacting me per week however what I put it down to is: 1. Location. Since I moved to SF the job offers have increased substantially . 2. Skill set. Fortunately I'm skilled in some "popular" languages. 3. Years of experience. I'm in the "hot spot" - not too old, and not too young (sorry - it does s…

I've actually had a similar struggle with the incessant but spammy recruitment emails, that I was able to fix almost perfectly. In the "Summary" section of my LinkedIn[1], I have a sentence that says this:

  "If you wish to contact me, please put the word 'Waffles' 
  in your message. It sounds silly, but it lets me know that 
  you have taken a little time to asses my profile, rather than 
  mass messaging people based on a keyword search."
"Waffles" will never be added by coincidence, so if I ever see that in the subject line of an email, I know that the recruiter has actually read my profile, and took the time to write a custom email to me. If it doesn't have the word "Waffles", I just ignore/delete it. It has dramatically improved the quality of emails I get from this vector

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joe-cortopassi/24/76b/5b9/

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#36
I'm not so sure about this bit:

> Resumes should be summaries, with more detail for recent positions, less detail for more distant ones. If you’ve been in industry for ten years, you can have a second page. No one needs more than two.

I agree with this in principle, and strongly 'implemented' this approach as well in an earlier version of my CV.

[To be fair, I'm looking for a product management role, and not a dev job, so maybe it's different here?]

But recruiters just kept asking me for a more detailed version so often, that I just gave up and made a 2-pager. I personally believe it goes into far too much detail than is necessary, but the difference in response is quite stark from both startups and BigCos alike.

From the other side of the issue, when recruiting PMs or analysts, I always made a conscious effort to ensure that CVs that fell afoul of 'industry standard guidelines' weren't overlooked solely for those reasons. As in, I honestly didn't give a shit if it was one page, or two, or six, as long as it gave the information I was looking for. (However, I suspect I may have been in a minority then..)

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#37
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted for University of Waikato reference. Hamilton is a wonderful city, but I opted for Victoria and Wellington instead..

New Zealanders other than me come here! It's funny that the Waikato reference is used the same way in an international forum as a it would be on a New Zealand one. Edited to make sense.

Hamiltron == shudder Hello fellow kiwis!

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#38
post #18

While I've never been a recruiter, I've been a hiring manager at some mid-sized companies and worked closely with their recruiters. Side projects or attempted startups are great, but I've seen countless resumes where they get completely overlooked because of how they appeared on the resume. Ultimately whether I saw a resume was dependent on some sort of subjective pattern matching done by the recruiter. This pattern…

It's an interesting point - true "recruiters" are typically much more limited in their ability to evaluate resumes, which is why hiring managers do the resume review at TripAdvisor (I wasn't being precise in my usage). In reference to your point about universities mattering, though, I'd love to see more resumes from Penn... ;)

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#39

I'm not so sure about this bit: > Resumes should be summaries, with more detail for recent positions, less detail for more distant ones. If you’ve been in industry for ten years, you can have a second page. No one needs more than two. I agree with this in principle, and strongly 'implemented' this approach as well in an earlier version of my CV. [To be fair, I'm looking for a product management role, and not a dev jo…

Every single person, whether they are a recruiter and project manager , a guidance counsellor or your mother has a different opinion about how long your CV/Resume should be and will have all sorts of reasons justifying why they are correct.

So the only sensible thing to do is go with the length that you feel sells you best.

Re: Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

#40
post #23

Wow, if you are skilled technically and aren't annoyed by constant recruiter outreach, you are doing something majorly wrong. I'd also say technical recruiters are also doing something majorly wrong if your resume reflects your abilities. If you've coded anything that does something interesting, you should have no problem finding interviews, and frankly offers. If you haven't coded anything interesting, then why woul…

I'm 19 and skipped college and university to travel, I freelanced for a couple of years and worked on games and personal hobby projects during this time and currently work at a small web development company. I only have 6 months of commercial experience but I get approached literally daily by recruitment companies because of a single resume I posted on a website and it is driving me crazy. They all ring me up and say…

Ouch, not so much fun. I should have been much more specific that this post was about getting interviews at companies, not getting agencies to put you into their mill. There are some good recruiting agencies, but the problem is there's no way to know which is which unless you've worked with a lot of them and have context. You're right, this would be a good area for disruption (or maybe a good new feature for GlassDoor).
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