How to Get More Responses to Your Resume | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

Hi! I'm Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. I'm called The Big Game Hunter because I hunted down leaders and staff organizations for more than 40 years. Let's talk about how to get more responses to your resume.

It's not just as simple as flipping resumes like burgers in a fast food restaurant over the transom of some organization. This is actually a pretty simple strategy to it. It does involve a couple different components.

So the 1st 1 is dealing with the generic resume that you might place on a job board, looking for responses from recruiters or third-party recruiters or corporations to the resume.. Here, you don't know what the job is that they're looking for so, understand, that they are looking at keywords. They’re searching via keywords and your resume needs to be keyword laden in order to get responses. It also has to be in your the top when they do their search because, if you let your resume sink more than 3 screens down (more likely two screens down) they’re never going to see it.

Being practical (and when you think about what you do on the web you do a search), how many screens down do you really go looking for a product? Screen 10? You’re on screen 1 or 2 and then you get distracted to something else and you never see anything beyond that. So your resume has to be the same.

One of the easiest ways to get your resume into onto page 1 or page 2 for your search term is to add a period a few lines down on the day that you refresh it. Let me explain more clearly.

In order to get fresh results, job boards or like search engines and newer, fresher content is at the top and older content goes to the bottom. So, you trick the search engine for the job board by adding a period a few lines down, let's say, the day that you refresh and then a few days later when you refresh it again, you delete that period. To the job board, that is change to your resume and moves it to a high position. That's really where you want to be consistently. You want to be on page 1 or page 2 of search terms.

By that I mean, in terms of search terms, you want to have lots of keywords in your resume. You, ideally, want to have them positioned relatively high in the resume because some of the search engines have tools that weight them, like Google does, for the probability of fit. One of these factors that they use is how high in the resume the key word is.

So, recognize that keywords, highly placed, early in the search result advantage you in search. So the that's the generic one that you might put on a job board for. .

If you're submitting a resume to an applicant tracking system (I'm not real big fan of that. I'll deal with that another video) but assuming that you want to do that, the simplest thing, I'm a tell you to do is, again, keyword rich but targeted toward the specific job that you're responding to. They don't care that you may have done 37 other things beyond the one that they care about. They need to see things in your resume to demonstrate the fit and you need to make it obvious to them.

So, targeted resumes submitted against specific jobs-- pretend a 6-year-old is reading the resume-- would your resume show a 6-year-old how you fit the job? If they have to make the 6-year-old stretch, is you are never going to get an invitation. .

Why do I talk about it being a 6-year-old? Recruiters are busy folks. They're not just simply recruiting for one job., They are interviewing people all day. They are talking to people like I was, talking to the hiring managers, doing phone interviews. A lot goes into their job. So, they may look at a resume for 15 to 20 seconds. 30 tops (more likely 6) before making the decision. You don't want to make it hard on them because, the reality is, if they have doubts, they hesitate and go to another resume. If they hesitate the likelihood is they are never going to come back to yours and give you another interview. They are certainly not going to call you and say, “ what about this? What about that?” That’s because the next resumes is probably going to have it.

So, make the fit obvious to them. Pretend, again, like you are dealing with a 6-year-old who has ADHD and who is finding it very difficult to pay attention just because they have so much else to do.

So, those are the 2 simplest strategies I can suggest to you for getting more responses to your resume