Having 200-300 CVs or resumes to analyse, a tight schedule, and probably working late, an employer's or recruiting manager's approach is to scan huge pile quickly and look for any little reason to trash your CV or resume. Learn how to avoid your CV or resume being trashed and how to almost guarantee that it gets noticed and shortlisted.The scenario described above of a recruiting manager or employer is fairly typical. With hundreds of CVs or resumes, little time, and pressure of identifying best person for job, strategy a recruiter takes is to first eliminate all those who show any little sign of being worthy of elimination. And basis of that is your CV and resume, highlighting great importance attached to this one or two page document.
So what happens when pile of 300 CVs and resumes are put in front of recruitment manager? Well there are three main steps, which are taken to filter pile. Filtering is needed to choose appropriate candidates for interview stage. So those not worthy of being interviewed have their CVs or resumes trashed. Lets take a look at them one by one.
The first stage: The 5-10 second glance
The recruitment manager is not going to spend minutes going through each CV or resume to find what he is looking for. Rather, his first step is to spend at most 10 seconds to take a quick glance at mainly first page and following page(s) if first page interests him. So process of elimination begins with following:
* Any CV or resume which is longer than 4 pages will be trashed. This is generally case, unless employer requires a detailed career history. But most CVs are no longer than three pages, and as for resumes they should be shorter. So recruitment manager will not be bothered reading anything over 4 pages.
* Any CV or resume that does not have a profile, or objective or similar paragraph and an easy discernible list of skills on front page will get trashed. The recruitment manager does not want to start scanning your CV or resume to see if he can find where your skills and achievements are, or what you are qualified to do. You are supposed to present that to recruitment manager using your career marketing tool, CV or resume.
* Any CV or resume which is written in long sentences and lengthy paragraphs and where a quick glance does not allow identification of relevant information, such as skills and achievements will get trashed. The recruitment manager is not there to read essays or novels.
* Any CV or resume which is annoying. This is mainly due to bad formatting. Things such as using many different fonts and font sizes, cluttering information with little white space, making it harder to read. Also use of excessive underlining, bold and italics, in combination. All of these matters make CV or resume difficult to read and follow and annoys recruitment manager.