Accountant and Bookkeeper Articles

By Dana Knight — The Indianapolis Star

Recruiters spend less than 20 seconds looking at your resume.

For every position open, only 10 percent of resumes get a second viewing after that initial scan, according to Monster.com. About 3 percent of resumes lead to interviews. And one person gets hired.

The odds are against you - big time.

“They’re looking for reasons to reject you,” says Irv Orenstein, president of Orenstein Advertising in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., who has provided job-hunting guidance for more than 30 years. “They can only consider a few. If you give them the right reason to dump yours, they will.”

So you’re thinking this is advice for the novice — a job-seeker who has never typed up a resume.

It is. But it’s for the workplace veteran, too. You would be surprised what the recruiters are saying about professionals with real jobs.

“Even when written by professionals, most resumes read like obituaries, and that’s why they get buried,” says Orenstein.

No one seems to be immune to a pathetic resume.

“We still get the resumes of people that put their pictures in with their height and weight,” says Janet Hambrock, a recruiting manager with ExactTarget, an Indianapolis software company specializing in e-mail marketing. “Don’t do that.”

Hambrock hires everyone from software engineers to salespeople. Among her biggest pet peeves: resumes written in third person. She also warns against listing personal information or hobbies.

“For the most part, that seems pretty harmless,” she says. “But the more they know about your personal life, the more they can discriminate.”

One way that can happen is with an e-mail address. If you have a personal e-mail like Partyer11@aol. com or HotMama@yahoo.com, that could be a problem. Opt to create another e-mail address to list on the resume, using your first and last name or initials.

Orenstein has his own list of common errors, mistakes that even the professionals make.

Most resumes are too long. The standard rule is to write one page for every 10 years of experience, says Orenstein. He suggests that all prospective job hunters offer a resume that is just one page.

Orenstein says another mistake is listing your salary requirement. The hiring team doesn’t know you or know how valuable you are, so it can only seem too high to them.

Don’t be me-oriented. Write the resume to please the reader. Let him or her know why hiring you will be good for the company.

Use a chronology. Orenstein suggests showing the progress you have made — starting with your first job and ending with the most current. It’s human nature to follow things in chronological order, he says.

Many resumes aren’t convincing. If=you say you doubled sales in a short amount of time, be specific so they know it’s the truth.

Which sounds better? “Worked diligently to surpass sales quota on an ongoing basis” or “exceeded $1 million quarterly sales quota by at least 25 percent for six consecutive quarters”?

Numbers are good, according to Monster.com, which provided the above example.

And, above all, forget the stiff, formal language. Write the way you talk. It’s more approachable. Less uppity.

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