When I post a job and I get candidates in response who are in high school with three page resumes! True story. Seriously, I just spent 3 hours going through resumes from job board listings.
A few patterns:
More than 80% (my best guess) of the resumes that come in from Craigslist are from spammy job seekers - the kind who don’t include a name, address, or a cover letter indicating which job they are responding to.
Any time you post an engineering job on Linkedin you will get consultants, project managers, sales reps, and anything but engineers. Engineers just don’t use LinkedIn to job hunt.
Engineers DO use Craigslist, but not the ones who you want to talk to.
Job descriptions are for wimps! I don’t really have time to count, but if I did I’ll bet that 90% of people who respond to jobs DO NOT read the job requirements. It isn’t that they miss the title, it is that they read the title and skip the rest. The part that really concerns me is that I’m not even talking about the people who are out there submitting their consultants for jobs manually or by script…I’m talking about the people who just don’t think they need to read the descriptions. If you are a recruiter and you call one of these people back you should kick yourself.
The longer the resume is the less likely it is that the person is qualified for the job. It isn’t that more pages is bad or frowned upon, it is a universal signal to hiring teams that you are hiding something (or just can’t find a job so you’ve hedged your bets and applied for all of them). Don’t worry if you have a 2-3 page resume if you have 10-30 years of experience, but if you have 10 years of experience and 23 pages of resume then you may want to seek professional help (I’m not talking about the resume writer kind either).
At least 30% (again, my best guess) of people responding to jobs online don’t feel that it is important to include their NAME. At least 60% (”) skip all or part of their last name. This isn’t just engineers (althought that part really concerns me - aren’t engineers supposed to pay attention to detail?).
