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Welcome to the reality of resume failure land. As a new resume writer, you may be totally unaware of the reception your resume receives. You may believe your resume, over which you have toiled for untold hours, is going to receive a fair reading, and a comprehensive assessment against benchmarks that are valid and reliable indicators of success requirements for positions for which you are applying. Most people hope that is the reception their carefully crafted credentials will encounter.

If you have decided you want to move to the right side of the tracks and need a better understanding of the environment your resume is likely to encounter in a modern business environment, take a few minutes to review a couple of scenarios to consider.Suzie is first. Suzie is a wonderfully skilled administrative assistant who has the best of intentions, but shares a difficulty that infects most work environments today . too much work, not enough time. and, Oh yes, days loaded with .surprises..

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What Suzie Does With Your Resume May Surprise You

Resume failure begins with Suzie and her boss, whom we.ll call Sam.

Suzie is the administrative assistant to Sam, Executive Vice President of a major corporation. Sam oversees an arm of the company with a budget of $600,000,000.32. He needs to add another product line to his inventory.

The first step in resume failure is that Sam does not have the time to take several weeks for R & D before he expands the product line. He needs someone with lots of experience not only in development of product lines, but who must also have some street smarts in the industry, lots of contacts, excellent start-up history, the ability to manage a tight budget allocation, and marketing savvy.

So, Sam.s first foray into this venture is to

• place an ad in the industry trade rag
• notify his alumni association at Yorkville A & M State University (good ole YAMSU)
and
• places ads in the Journal, the Times, the Post, and the Constitution and Journal.

Once Sam placed the ads, the set-up for resume failure advances. He thinks up a few considerations, tells Suzie to screen the resumes through them and bring him the top 10 for further review, thinking Suzie can sift through the 40 to 50 resumes he expects to get for this $148.000 position.

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The First Steps of Resume Failure

On Monday, the resume failure saga has an innocuous beginning. Suzie has a plan in place with a couple of hours she can take out of her schedule this week to carefully review the 40-50 resumes Sam anticipates.

About 10:15, Johnnie, the mail room clerk, comes by with 11 USPS Express-Mail overnight packages for Sam. Sam opens them up, realizes they are all resumes and gives them to Suzie, who is on the phone trying to set up a meeting Bill (Sam.s boss) had asked Sam to set up last month.

She has 18 phone calls to make to get this done, and since Bill.s meeting is higher priority than Sam.s resumes are, she spends a couple of hours deftly coordinating schedules, rearranging conflicts for 3 junior level managers without administrative support staff, but finally gets the meeting set.

Then she finds out the meeting room she had counted on is already occupied. Not to worry, she finds another location after a 20 minute phone search. Of course, that meeting room has no microphone, tables, chairs, podium, screen, or projector available.

Not to worry again, Suzie has been in this organization for 13 years, knows who to call, and knows how to call in favors for the maintenance staff to commit to the set-up and completes this surprise challenge. Kudos for Suzie!!!

By this time, lunch has come and gone, and her discretionary time is down to 40 minutes. So, Suzie takes each resume and cover letter to her desk to begin pouring over the details. The first nine resumes have obvious errors . spelling, awkward layout, educational deficiencies, inappropriate work histories, coffee stains and whiteout, so she has two that she lays aside for Sam.

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Resume Failure Clouds Loom On The Horizon

Tuesday, the resume failure saga begins to have a slightly negative turn. Suzie has a similar schedule, with half a dozen more .priority. interruptions with which she must work. However, Tuesday.s mail brings her 81 more resumes.

By late afternoon, Suzie has had a total of about 38 minutes to work on the resumes. That gives her about 30 seconds per resume. She screens out the obvious .misfits,. and places the others in Sam.s .possibles. stack.

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The Resume Failure Storm Strikes

Wednesday, there are some complications in the resume failure saga. Suzie has three meetings with compulsory attendance that take up over three hours of her precious time.

When she returns to her desk from the second one, she holds her breath. Johnnie has brought a stack of resumes that totals nearly 245. This time, she only has time to open the packages, pull out the papers, and look for glaring errors before she begins to use file 13. She takes the rest, none of which she has time to study, and places them in a review stack, hoping to gain a few extra minutes on Thursday.

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The Resume Failure Storm Intensifies

Thursday the resume failure saga only gets deeper, as ultimately Suzie, with another jammed day, is flooded with another 278 resumes. Suzie is so overwhelmed she has to call maintenance to open a closet and stack all this paper in the corner until she can get to it. Her schedule is now complicated by a call from her baby-sitter who says her 3 year old has fever and is coughing. Suzie has no choice but to take off three hours early to go to the doctor, call her mother, make explanations of what is going on at work, and beg her to take care of Serena on Friday.

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Friday, things begin to taper off, and Suzie only receives another 183. By the time she goes through the initial sifting process, she has cut the stack of .potentials. down to 197.

You are now about to see why resume failure is so serious a problem to ordinary resumes.

Suzie now has one hour and twenty minutes to make decisions about which 10 resumes get to Sam.

Of the 197, 31 have all the right credentials, but somewhat less than perfect documents, with such mundane problems as

• misaligned columns
• too many fonts
• no Career Objective clearly stated
• no Professional Summary
• inappropriate spacing
• misplaced commas (Suzie.s fetish)
• smudges
• whiteout
• what appear to be coffee stains
and
• other similar negligence related problems

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Of 798 submitted resumes, 48 cases of resume failure were attributed to being produced with MS Word Resume Template, making them virtually indistinguishable.

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Of the remaining 166, Suzie sees 43 that are from out of state locations, and decides she will arbitrarily save the company moving expenses by eliminating them.

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Suzie comes up with 10 resumes for Sam to review on Monday. 39 new resumes arrive, but the "possibles" have already been sent to Sam, and the newest ones are not even opened.

Are Sam's 10 "possibles" the best candidates? Who knows? Suzie has done the absolute best she could have done, but with the incomplete instructions, unmanageable schedule and all the other "stuff" she has to complete, there was no time to give each candidate a fair reading. She only forwarded the ones that have grabbed her attention in that 15 second window.

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Another Resume Failure Scenario

Other companies, combat resume failure by considering an alternative to the “Suzie Factor,” and have determined to go about things a bit differently. They use modern technology to do keyword scans of all their applicants. The major advantage of keyword scanning is the ability to screen out inappropriate resumes from submissions that number in the thousands.

The theory is wonderful, and computers do exactly what they are instructed to do – they find all candidates whose resumes contain the exact keyword mix they have been given.

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How Keyword Scanning Contributes to Resume Failure

Resume failure also shows up with keyword scanning resumes. The process assumes things not always in evidence. It assumes everyone:  

• Knows all the correct keywords
• Knows all the variants of the keywords
• Knows how to spel the keywards korectly
• Uses a scannable typeface
• Searches for all the variants of the keywords, including
• alternate spellings
• colloquial euphemisms and
• proprietary terms

Unfortunately, almost all keywords have variants that sometimes resemble colloquialisms – used by some of the industry, but unknown to many of its participants – both corporate and academia.

Further, not all of the corporate or academic entities focus on the entirety of a discipline. The more technologically advanced our society becomes, the less comprehensive its participants become. The detail is simply too immense for all to master.

The problem that brings is while there are highly qualified applicants for positions with all the skills, abilities and knowledge needed for a particular job, they may not all use exactly the same jargon to discuss the discipline.

Computer search algorithms usually do not understand this dilemma, and are seldom constructed to compensate for it.

Language and communication are extremely complex. Consider the following five gents who come into a local soda shop looking for some form of carbonated beverage to slake their thirst.

• One asks for a “soda”
• another wants “pop”
• a third asks for “coke”
• a fourth asks for a “cold drink”
, and
• the fifth asks for an “ice-cold belly washer”

To the uninitiated, these are five different requests for five different items. In different parts of this great land, however, it is conceivable all five are asking for exactly the same thing, and none of them is requesting a brand named beverage. All would be satisfied with the same product.

Similarly, with English being a “live” language, it is constantly changing. The way people speak of things changes as well.

Unless someone has a massive database of terms and has traveled to all parts of the industry, it is conceivable that John is looking for Jim’s exact set of qualifications, but because they do not use exactly the same set of keywords, they may never run across each other. Perhaps the scanner was looking for a plural form, Jim submitted the singular, and the programmer was unaware of the fact that some terms plurals are something other than simply adding an “s” on the end.

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Reducing Your Risk of Resume Failure

No one can guarantee to completely inoculate you against resume failure.

How To Make A Resume is designed and being built to help you understand the principles behind making great resumes, teach you a process that will help you, and give you access to some great resources and services.

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You are cordially invited to return to this site as often as you wish and download items that are helpful to you. While this website is copyrighted 2007, you may reference items contained on this page so long as you identify the source.

Please keep in mind this is an ongoing project, being carefully wordsmithed, one page at a time.