Recruiting Blog

Perfect Resumes

Resume focus is a problem especially if perfect is a goal

About 20 years ago, someone made it popular to write ideal job descriptions to get better hires. That has made a mess as I see it.   There was always a tendency to make your resume perfect, but now the pressure from ideal JD’s is too high and people are faking resumes too much. Perfect resumes have become way too common. I am not against high standards for your hires. I am against demands for perfect resumes.  We need to have high standards on character and even transparency, and lower our standards for the perfect resume. When you do that, the quality of your hires can go up. That has been at the core of my hiring success since 1997. Naturally it has given my company a great reputation, so we would never turn back.

Perfect Resumes Requirements Make Things Worse

Are there any perfect people? If so, I am out as cannot reach that level. So perfect resumes followed after ideal JD’s. We need to think how to not force people to lie so that they appear perfect while you overlook the people who are honest. The good people then get no good offers. That is a tragedy that exists, and our company tries to correct that in our work every day. We know from experience that perfect resumes are highly suspect. We check them very closely to see if they are real. What good is a perfect resume if it is not true? Our experience is 90% of perfect resumes are not true. It is a lot of work to get the right people the first time, but it is overwhelmingly worth it. Can you think of good reasons a person might have gaps on their resumes or be unemployed?  We know there are many good reasons. Of course, we do not take any reason given to us as fact. We check all and also ask our customers to believe us when we say this ugly resume is worth your time.

Perfect Resumes getting us in trouble?

Some companies have offered us contracts to get us in a resume beauty contest. The standard is for all the recruiters they sign to fire off as many beautiful resumes as possible as fast as possible. Whoever is first with the most beautiful resume is likely to get the hire and earn the money. We see this as nonsense. If all you want from us is packaged resumes, then you need to find someone else as that is not our business, When companies have a mitt full of recruiting companies, they cannot get close to any of them, Each of them gets a JD and a few words from the HR All we can do is find beautiful resumes as we do not know the deeper heart issues of this placement,

Our goal is to send our customers vetted resumes and often they are not beautiful but the person is gold. In the resume beauty contest, these rough diamonds are often overlooked. Forbes has a well done article on how to write a resume that is perfect that you can see here. I wonder why we do not say ‘excellent’? Is perfect driving candidates to lie? What is the sin in a guy having a 3 month gap in his resume? That is not beautiful to most companies. A perfect resume has no gaps unfortunately.  However, many companies would train their people to overlook such people. In our work, we can go deeper with people who lack perfection. In a beauty contest, recruiters package these resumes and make the gaps go away.  Is that what you want?