I thought I would tie in to the Rock Star’s post about Attracting the Passive Candidate. Let’s look at it from the other side – what do candidates have to do to “be attractive” to the hiring company.
I was catching up to an older post from Guy Kawaski’s blog and something jumped out at me. Guy playfully submitted his email cover and resume for a Yahoo position and allowed these 2 items to be critiqued by a recruiting manager from Yahoo. I thought her analysis was excellent. This part caught my attention:
The resume calls out the positions held and a brief description of the responsibilities. What it lacks is the “so what.” What I mean by that is that it needs to call out what the impact/benefit was to the company when you held those roles.
As we become innundated with more information in the information age, standing out becomes increasingly more difficult. The “so what?” approach is one we use when determining a company’s value proposition. Whatever your value proposition is today, it should be able to answer the question, so what?
The same principle applies to candidate resumes. If they simply state they grew the territory by 115% . . . so what? It sounds impressive, but what did it do for the company? How did you accomplish such a feat? How did it stack up to other territories?
You get the point. A strong resume speaks to results and their impact within the company in direct details. We see many sales resumes that claim success without defining the impact. If you have read The Hire Sense for any amount of time, you know that we do not place much value on the resume. However, a strong candidate should not overlook the importance of a resume that easily passes the so what test.