Why is Your Resume Important?

Once upon a time, the recruitment machine rolled on slower wheels. Inadequate resumes could be analysed, redesigned and reconstructed to present the candidate in the most favourable light.

Today, with speed of the essence, that’s rarely an option.

And even if it were, the legal situation has changed so radically that few recruitment agencies (even if they had all the time in the world) would feel justified in ‘fiddling’ with someone else’s paperwork.

So… what you see is what you get.

And what clients are getting in terms of resumes is not always a job-winning document.

Google ‘writing resumes’ and you’ll get a swag of self professed experts who claim to be able to produce templates and samples of resumes that ‘get results’. And perhaps they do.

But most of the samples shown are not going to cut it with those professionals interviewing for Windsor Recruitment’s clients – either at agency or client level.

A resume (or CV) is a compact, purpose-designed key to getting you in the door.
Its purpose is to win you an interview with your employer of choice.
But first it has to get you past the gatekeeper.

Let’s say that a professional Consultant gets 100 applications for a single job. From these resumes, he/she then has to decide who is going to make it to the A-List.

Now, be honest.

With that task ahead of you, would you find particular favour with any applicant who sent in pages of closely packed, generic verbiage, much of which has been lifted from the Internet?

Of course not.

You’ll automatically see a badly presented and jumbled resume as evidence of less than acceptable communication and professional skills. Then, by the time you wade through it, trying to isolate the plus factors from the dross, any enthusiasm you had for that candidate will be waning.

And so it is with Consultants. In reality, the time they have available to apply to fossicking out details from a resume is necessarily quite short.

It’s self evident that if you can persuade him/her of your value by offering a clear and engaging picture of your personal and professional achievements, you’re more likely to move smoothly to the next stage of the selection process.