Keep up to date on articles and news and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Getting resume to stay in pack is first step when job hunting

Unfortunately, there are a whole host of things you can do in a minute or less to knock yourself out of consideration for a job you want even if you may be right for the gig.

Here are some tips on what to do and what not to do in order to land the right job.

Today’s job market is a process of weeding out candidates as aggressively as possible. It’s hard to blame employers for shortening the list of candidates when there are so many good people on the job market. It’s a matter of survival for recruiters and hiring managers.

While it’s true they hate to overlook a great candidate, there will be too many people to interview if they don’t knock people off their interviewing list. Their first impulse is to take a resume out of the stack and pitch it — sometimes for very trivial reasons.

Your goal as a job seeker is just to keep your resume in the stack. You can impress a hiring manager at the interview. Your resume just needs to get you in the door. That won’t happen if any of the following mistakes happen along the way:

# When you send your resume by e-mail, send it in a cleaned-up plain text version along with a Word attachment. Being on the receiving end of this e-mail traffic, I’d rather print out and read plain text resumes all day long than have to deal with some attachment that won’t open because of compatibility problems.

# When you send e-mail to a prospective employer, include your contact information prominently on the message. When listing your contact information, you should use the phone number at which you can be reached most often.

# Many hiring managers and recruiters get a strong resume and instantly pick up the phone for a quick phone screen. If your phone number is hard to find, it slows the process and that’s the last thing you want.

# Because they’re calling you, you get to ask questions before you start answering them. For example, who is the employer? What is the job? Where is it located? Don’t give out salary information on a phone call with the employer (you can get to that later).

On an interview, be your usual professional, friendly, engaging and intellectually curious self. Avoid asking a lot of nut-and-bolt questions before there’s evidence of a strong mutual interest. Though I’m sure you’ve wasted time on going-nowhere opportunities before, that still doesn’t mean you can ask about the comp plan, the benefits and the size of your office on the first interview.

Some candidates think when they sit down with the junior HR person that it’s OK to ask these questions because no one else talks to these people. Wrong. When I was one of these people, I got the real lowdown on job candidates because they thought they were talking to the wall.

I would rat them out in a second, so use discretion in every conversation.

Lastly, find out about the CEO. Though you probably won’t meet this person (unless it’s a really small company), make a gut observation if you are lucky enough to even shake hands with him or her in your visits to the company. Is this person ethical, competent, smart and a good leader?

If it’s a large company, ask around. Remember that no element of a business influences what it’ll be like to work in a company anywhere near as strongly as the personality of the CEO.

I know jobs are tight, but if the CEO leaves a negative impression on you, the job will be bad. Don’t take it.