Today's HR professionals can feel the constant shifts of the ground beneath them. Everything is in flux. The job market has shifted dramatically over the past few years. As AI takes center stage in both the tech world and everywhere downstream of it (which is, you know, everywhere), recruiting professionals are left with the dizzying task of finding qualified people to fill jobs that are no longer what they once were, and won’t be what they currently are for long.
In case you’ve never thought about it, HR professionals post jobs that thousands of candidates peruse and submit resumes to. They then sort through those thousands of resumes in search of a diamond. The problem here is that diamonds are small and easy to miss when they’re hidden in mountains of coal and cubic zirconia. There must be a way to make your resume shimmer enough to catch these prospectors’ eyes.
If you’re a graphics person, you can always send out cleverly branded and watermarked resumes, but what about the rest of us? How can we stand out? We need an “it” factor, the written equivalent of a pocket square.
If you're applying for jobs and not getting any feedback, it could be that you’re using a cookie-cutter cover letter and resume that are also being deployed by thousands of your peers. HR people are painfully aware that most people blast off the same content to dozens of jobs without stopping to consider their target audience. They’re sifting through 1000s of resumes for haystack needles, for the candidate who looks like they were ready to begin yesterday.
The question, then, is how to create that impression of readiness in a way that is eye-catching without being so eccentric that it’s repellent. For starters, consider taking the following suggestions:
Take your time while you search for work. Think quality, not quantity. By refusing to contribute to the deluge of mediocre matches, you are taking a strategic stance with your career search that will put you in a much better position than the alternative approach. Keep in mind that you deserve to find the right fit.