One other piece of advice, from a manager who gets resumes every week on my desk: a cover letter can make a big difference.
Try to put yourself in the chair of the hiring manager. Right now I have a couple of openings for chemists. We have ads in a few places, and I have a couple of trusted technical recruiters looking for me. The candidates from the headhunters get first look, because I’ve worked with these guys for years, they know me and my company (in fact, they’ve both visited my company and toured my city and area so that they can best represent us) and they only send me candidates they think would be a good fit. I talk with the recruiters about each candidate before phone interviews; sometimes I eliminate the candidate due to the discussion with the recruiter for various reasons. I always give the recruiter permission to tell the candidate why we chose not to go further with them.
As for the rest of the resumes piling up on my desk: SOMETHING needs to stand out about the resume to differentiate it from the others. I can’t interview every candidate who sends in a resume. So I read each one, and put them in piles: Nope, maybe, and pursue. Most of the resumes are pretty similar. List of experience, statement that they are seeking a job in which they can use their skills to make a difference, etc., publications and associations. So - what makes one stand out from the others?
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A good cover letter that concisely shows they’ve done their homework on our company and is very specific in why they can be a good fit and make us a more effective R&D organization. That shows they didn’t just blindly send us (and 30 other companies) their resume.
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A resume that catches my attention right at the very top of the resume. That would include resumes that start with a bullet point list of their key attributes and skills and proven deliverables; then the rest of the resume serves to back it up. And those bullet points should be specific to what we’re looking for.
I’m fortunate in that, other than my first job, I had over 20 years experience in a role in which I did a lot of hiring before I had to go looking for a job. I then ended up having to look for 3 more jobs in 5 years (2004, 2007, and right at the depth of the recession in 2009.) This sounds like bragging, and I know I was lucky, but using the experience I had trying to figure out who to follow up with and who to put on the “maybe” pile and “absolutely” pile, I have never applied to an opening and not received an offer to interview, and I have never had an interview for which I did not get a job offer. I am convinced the reason for the former is that I never sent the same resume to two different companies. I studied them, searched online for all of the information I could find, used every network resource I could find to get as much info on the company and the department doing the hiring as I could (in a couple of cases I actually connected with some people who knew the hiring manager!) and then crafted my resume and cover letter specifically to that company,that organization, their needs, etc.
For example: One company, which I knew had a flood of applicants, was a company with some very specific products in the semiconductor manufacturing process. Their ads bragged about how they had over 68% market share world wide, how they were the world leaders, how profitable they were, all sunshine. As to the labs for which they needed a director, oh, they were world leaders in technology, they had all these competitive advantages, etc.
BUT - I found on their website the transcripts of their quarterly reports to Wall Street, including the Q&A from the guys from the investment companies. That revealed some really tough questions on new competition from large global companies (this company was a startup from about 8 years before,had about 800 employees,) eroding market share, pressure on pricing, etc. Looking at some forums on the company on Yahoo Finance and elsewhere, I read comments from employees about the company not knowing what to do going forward - they had huge profits and market share because they were first to market and thus sat on their laurels and now huge companies decided to jump into the market place, with more resources, better economies of scale, etc. and the company leadership was pretty young and no one had experience in how to respond. (BTW - you have to be careful on such forums, because more gripers and whiner tend to post, but you can get a feel if you read with care.) I looked up on the company website the Bios of the management team; all were pretty inexperienced and young. OK - now instead of my age being a negative,I can turn my experience into an advantage. My big negative: never worked in their industry and I’m applying to run their R&D.
Based on all of that plus a LOT of additional homework, I wrote my cover letter and resume to feature my experience in leading R&D organizations facing tough competition in markets which were being threatened by new entries and potential commoditization. I made it clear that, having worked at a large global company for years, I knew how to go up against such a company and how to counter their strengths. In short, I made it clear that I knew how to counter the challenges they were facing and backed it up on the resume with experiences and accomplishments that specifically demonstrated success at those skills.
I got a call from them 3 days after I submitted my resume. They told me they’d like to skip the phone interview and bring me in for an interview that week. I could tell, during the interview, that there was a lot of nervousness about hiring someone who had no experience in their market; the other candidates were from Motorola, IBM, TI, etc. I did a LOT of studying of the industry and the technology and science to make them comfortable (I could talk the lingo and knew the process and the current challenges of the industry, e.g. the struggle (this was 2004) to design for smaller and smaller feature sizes but the issues with the dielectrics, issues with moving into Copper, moving to more layers, etc. I made sure they knew, hey, I don’t have the experience with all of this but I do understand the challenges, I’m a fast learner, you have a lab of Ph.D.s in the area who I can learn from, my strength is setting the strategy and executing, etc. I got a job offer before I left. In spite of a VP of Sales who felt they HAD to hire someone from the industry - everyone else, including the CEO, said don’t let this guy leave without an offer.
My point is not that I’m “great.” Far from it. I know from looking at the resumes of candidates, after I got there, that frankly they had candidates who were far more qualified than I was. But their resumes were pretty generic, and my resume and cover letter hit them right at what was keeping them up at 2 AM worrying.
Yeah, you can’t always do that. My point is the closer you can tailor your resume to the specific needs of the company, the better your chances. You HAVE to find a way to make your resume stand out from all the other candidates who probably have the same experience (maybe more!) that you do. The best way to do that, in my experience on both sides of the interview desk, is to do a LOT of homework on the company before you submit the resume, then craft a resume and cover letter that is very specific to their needs.
FWIW
