What Human Resource and Hiring Managers Want

One simple fact: employers spend anywhere from ten seconds to two minutes reviewing a single resume. That is a small window for an applicant to make an impression on a piece of paper. So how does a job seeker stand out in a sea of other potential employees? Easy. Know what your hopeful employer will likely be looking at in your resume.

Eighty percent of employers claim that “related experience” is the first place they look. This is the category of a resume which often overshadows scholastic merit. There is a simple explanation for this reasoning. Most jobs are not new jobs but are jobs that have recently become vacant. Employers who are filling these jobs are looking for a candidate who has plenty of experience with the tasks the occupation demands. Hiring an inexperienced job seeker means that an immense amount of training is necessary in order to bring the new hire up to par. This consumes a lot of time and money. With that in mind, selecting a candidate who has related experience is by far the best way for an employer to save the company time and money.

What makes an employer spend ten seconds looking at a resume as opposed to two minutes?
There are a few factors to consider. Let’s outline the obvious first.

Proper spelling and grammar are fundamental. Submitting a resume with improper spelling and sloppy grammar to an employer is the same as wearing t-shirt and jeans to an interview; it creates a bad impression. It demonstrates many ideas to employers, such as: incompetence, laziness, oversight, or a deficit in professionalism. A good resume is only two pages, try to focus and spell everything properly for that short pagination.

Aesthetics is another aspect to consider. Resumes which utilize interesting fonts truly capture a reader’s attention. Obviously getting carried away with it is the wrong maneuver, but the point is apparent. Effective resumes look good. They are neat, orderly and are not a strain on the eyes. Getting enticing qualifications on the page is an essential ingredient, but aesthetics gets your resume the attention it deserves. And since your prospective employer will likely be handling thousands of resumes to fill only a few positions, it is only polite to keep the aesthetics gentle on a reader’s eyes.

Brevity is the primary focus for employers. General consensus reveals that employers prefer resumes to be two pages in length. If your resume is four pages in length then you probably need to cut some information which is likely superfluous anyway. We already know that employers are immediately looking for “related experience,” so why bother truncating your resume with schools, interests, and accomplishments. These elements are important, but they don’t need to be developed to such an extent that the length of your resume becomes an eye sore for employers. An employer won’t lose sleep over the hundreds of resumes which were discarded on semantics such as spelling errors or long windedness.

In respect to “related experience,” any location you have lent several years to warrants mentioning, but if you have spent two years or less with a company you might want to omit their names from your resume. It is true that with the insertion of the “millenials” (a new generation of work force who seem to be tilting the scales in the job market’s demand) into the job market that employers are becoming more lax with their interpretation of how much time spent with a company qualifies as loyalty. Statistics still show that anything more than two years demonstrates a job seekers loyalty. Anything less creates the opposite conclusion.