You lost your job many months back. Since then you have been aggressively looking for a job. You are responding to hundreds of opens jobs every week and sending out your resumes to every possible company, recruiter, and even to your personal contacts but nothing seems to be working. You are more concerned because you are not even getting interview calls. Yes, job market is tuff. Very few jobs are opening up and so, you have to compete with hundreds of candidates for very open position you are applying for. But still, in spite of this dwindling economy, “one person” is getting every specific job that you too applied for.
- Why not you?
- Why resume is not among the top few who are called for interview?
- Why your resume is always discarded by the hiring manager?
- Why no one takes a second look at your resume?
After all you are well qualified with many years of experience and expertise in certain domains. Still no job is coming your way, why? Don’t blame anyone else for your woes. It is your resume and your presentation style that is killing your job prospects. A very large number of candidates while applying for jobs do not even realize the countless obstacles they create for themselves during the process of applying for jobs.
These are some of the most common pitfalls.
When you force hiring managers to toss out your own resume
I cannot even imagine that some well educated and highly experienced professionals can commit this common mistake across the board. I see this happening in more than half of the resumes I receive in response to all our open positions on a daily basis. Most of the prospective candidates name their resumes as “resume.doc” while sending resumes as attachments. Look at the problem we hiring managers have to face now:
Very first thing we do is right-click your attachment and click “Save”, to save your resume, so that we can read it later. If you named your resume as “resume.doc”, that is what appears as file name when we click “Save”. So, now your resume is saved as “resume.doc” in our records. An hour later, we open another candidate’s resume which is also named as “resume.doc”. Now see what happens. When we click Save, we see this message flashed on screen: The file resume.doc already exists. Do you want to replace the existing file? Now, look what have you done to your resume? If we click Yes, then resume of the first candidate (imagine if you were this first candidate) has gone forever. If we click No, then we have to provide a name for your resume. Ideally, we would like to save your resume as your_name.doc for future references but at this point, we do not even know your name.
To find out your name, we now have to open your resume, copy your name, close your resume, then right-click your attachment and click Save As, paste your name which we copied in above step as file name and then click save.
Are you realizing that you just wasted about one minute of hiring manager’s time? Now imagine how irritating it is for us when we receive hundreds of resumes every day and majority of these all named as “resume.doc”. For us, the only way to not allow people like you waste our time is that we just skip all such emails with resumes named as “resume.doc” because most hiring managers, who are at the CIO, CTO, HR Director level cannot afford to waste one minute for every single resume to just save the file for future reference.
You can see how this little carelessness is costing you a job at the prospective company even though you could have been the ideal fit for the position you applied for.
When you make it difficult for hiring managers to contact you
This is another very common example of the problem I face a lot when I try to reach a candidate. You apply for a job and email your resume. We find your skills and experience a reasonably good match for the position. In your contact information is your cell phone number and I decide to call you and plan to leave a voice mail with my phone number so that you can contact me later. But on many occasions, instead of an option to leave a voice mail, I hear a recorded message, saying, “This Voice mail box is full. You cannot leave voice mail at this time”. What do you think, I should do now. Call you every few hours hoping that either you will pick up the phone or you might have deleted some old voice mails and I will be able to leave a voice mail for you next time I call. No, I will not do that. I will just move on to the next candidate. In couple of cases, I actually sent an email to the candidates, with the flash news “Your voice mail box is full. Please delete your old voice mails, so that I can leave a message for you and schedule a possible interview for the job you applied in our company”. Do you think we will do that for every candidate who has his "voice mail box full"? No, we won't.
If you are in the job market, please make it a point to regularly delete your old voice mails and make it easy for hiring managers to contact you.
Realistically, you should be doing this anyway even if you are not looking for a job. What if your family is in a medical emergency and someone is trying to reach you but is getting the recorded message “Voice mail box is full. You cannot leave voice mail at this time”. That can be tragic in some situations.
When you ask hiring managers to do what should be your responsibility
This is not too common a mistake but still happens many times. We understand that you apply for many open positions and it is not possible to remember the position description of every job you applied for. But when we call you OR send an email to you in response to your resume you sent to us while applying for our advertised job, it is inappropriate to ask us by return email to send you the job description.
It will help you to be a bit more organized and save a copy of the job description in a company specific folder on your computer. That way, even if hiring manager contacts you one or two months after you applied, you can always go to that specific company folder and look at the position description instead of asking your possible future employer to send you the job description. Such a request will create a negative impression long before you are called for the interview. And let me add that most hiring managers will put your resume on the side a minute after you make such a request.
In my next blog, I will talk about how we can help you in writing a professional and sophisticated resume that can put you ahead of your competition in the job market.
For any career help during your job search, please feel to Talk to us directly.
