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Sat, May 17, 2008 1:38 EDT

Your Resume's 4 Audiences

Did you realize that your resume has up to 4 audiences

Topic: Personal Management

Current Rating: 3 Comment: 1

Most job seekers write their resume for the hiring manager. That's it.

Did you realize that your resume has up to 4 audiences, not just one? Miss what's important to any one of those audiences and you'll be passed over for interviews and offers.

Here's how it works:

Audience #1 - The Resume Database: How can a database be an audience? Simple...large and midsized companies input all resumes into their database, whether sent via email, hand delivered in paper, sent to a company's website, or sent by a recruiter. Your resume gets sent to the database even if you've met the hiring manager, in most cases.

Companies use a resume database to pre-screen and micro-target candidates, to efficiently find resumes with desired skills. Companies also document hiring practices for the EEOC - How can a company discriminate in hiring, when they search ALL resumes, ranking for keywords? This practice drives most candidates nuts, because they don't understand why, or how to effectively deal with resume databases.

Most companies get hundreds or thousands of resumes for each position posted. Keyword searches pre-screen to the top 2-3%, who move to audience #2.

Audience #2 - The HR Clerk: Let's say you used Resume Search Optimization, and your resume earns review by humans. Congratulations! Your resume was ranked in the top 2-3% of resumes submitted!

You've graduated to the HR clerk, who provides a human screening before passing a group of resumes she's approved to the hiring manager. To keep things efficient, this is usually assigned to a low level clerk, who's an HR generalist. This person generally does not have experience in the job that she's reviewing, unless of course the job is in HR.

This HR clerk's job is to manually review resumes for lots of jobs for the company, and they look at hundreds of resumes each day. After a while they all start to look the same.

The HR Clerk is manually looking for a list of keywords, to see where they appear, and to see if the computer picked applicants that the Hiring Manager will want to see.

The average time spent reviewing a resume is 15 seconds, and it's usually reviewed on screen, not printed. The successful job seeker grabs the HR clerk's attention in 15 seconds.

Audience #3 - The Hiring Manager: The hiring manager gets 10-15 resumes from HR, and usually ranks them mentally. Out of 15 resumes, there are usually 2-3 that the hiring manager is really excited to see. Smart hiring managers schedule these first. But even if you are the first interview, and the favored candidate, had great rapport, the hiring manager still has to interview the rest (EEOC, remember?).

Your resume is your first impression to the hiring manager. In addition, your resume can be used to strategically place information that the hiring manager will question - in an interview. Smart job seekers can use this as an opportunity to "bait" the interviewer to ask questions that will demonstrate strengths.

Audience #4 - The Hiring Manager's Boss: The hiring manager's boss, team, or peers will often be asked to review top candidate resumes, even if they have never interviewed the candidate. This is often used as a "gut check" or to gain buy-in from other stakeholders.

Does your resume address all 4 audiences?

Phil Rosenberg
President, reCareered & Rainmakers Global
Blog: http://reCareered.blogspot.com

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Average (2 votes)
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Sun, May 18, 2008 18:06 EDT
Posted by: Mark Cummuta
Rating: 90

Phil,

I agree with your four audiences. The difficulty most candidates face is how to unplug themselves from the document. Or perhaps more accurately, disentangle their ego from their resume.

While this is primarily true of those recently laid off, it is also true of many that are still working but starting to brush up their resume in preparation for a job search.

At issue is that most people see this 2-dimensional document called a resume as the means to getting their next job. Therefore, it needs to show all their talent, all their skills, and all their successes. That is a problem because in today's market, hiring managers are looking for specific skillsets, specific experiences, and specific leadership talents.

The jarring truth is that you can not be all things to all people; your resume can not possible portray all your skills, experiences and successes in such a manner to be relevant to all opportunities. That kind of depth of detail would require a book, and those are called biographies, not resumes.

In fact, no piece of paper, or books for that matter, can accurately portray the complete depth and breadth of who you are! That requires you to meet the hiring manager and talk to them.

Therefore, what a resume IS is a marketing tool, and that tool has a single purpose. It is NOT to get you hired, but rather, a resume is entirely dedicated to getting a hiring manager interested enough in you to want to interview you!!! That's it!

BUT, in that change of purpose candidates have in some ways an easier task at hand, and also a bit more difficult task.

A specifically-targeted "marketing" resume is crisp, concise, and focused on the exact position specifications required. It is no longer a bio, but instead has become almost a "yes/no" answer to just those most critical requirements if posed as questions.

Another way to think of a targeted marketing resume is as a precision-guided missile. Using state-of-the-art intelligence (that's you, the candidate), the target (the firm and opportunity) is first evaluated against your mission requirements. Once the target is finalized, it's coordinates (the position specifications) are programmed into the guidance system so that the target acquisition system (the various audiences described by the above article, as well as the hiring manager) can receive the missile's payload (your resume). And in this analogy, the final delivery is "da bomb" (a very good thing) rather than to "a bomb" (or dud).

Mark Cummuta

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