. . . losing sight of its goal.

We spend hours and hours crafting our resumes. Yet, in the efforts of trying to perfect the document, we often lose sight of its true purpose. And that is a ‘make or break’ mistake. I, as professional recruiter, have done this in the past because it’s just so easy when you’re in resume mode.

MYTH: A resume’s purpose is to get you a job.

TRUTH: A resume’s purpose is to get you an interview.

Losing sight of this can be detrimental to your job search success. To land an interview – this is your resume’s main purpose. If your resume had embedded analytics, it’s likely that 60% of its unique views would occur before the phone interview; 25-40% of views would occur throughout your interview process; and any remaining 15% would occur at the very end, perhaps when the decision-makers had narrowed-down you and one other candidate as finalists, and they pulled out your credentials one last time as a data point.

Here is some perspective of a corporate recruiter reviewing your resume along with 50 to 100 other applicants:

“Okay, I’m going to give each of these resumes a 20-30 second scan . . . this one is 4 pages and tells me very little about candidate’s the results . . . [PASS] . . . hhmm, this one is only two pages, and look at all those metrics . . . I don’t know who they are or if they’d fit, but sure as heck am going to put them in the ‘phone interview’ pool to find out more!”

This is the mindset. With the resume, it’s not “Do I want to hire this person?” it’s “Do I want to find out more?” and “Are they intriguing?” That’s an important distinction. Think of it this way: If you’re single, you’re not going to approach a casual first date saying, “Here’s my life story, let’s get married!!”

Here are some tips for “writing for the interview.” Note: A ‘Summary’ section is fine; listing involvement in professional associations is great (if they’re relevant to the job). I suggest these below as they relate to the bullet points you include for your individual jobs:

• Remind yourself – over and over – that there’s a reason interviews exist. The reader of your resume is not expecting to hire you based only off your resume. Remember that.
• Include as many metrics, figures and percentages as possible. The eye will naturally be drawn to and intrigued by “%”s and “#s” and “$”s.
• Cater the resume to the job description, and what it calls for. Don’t include unnecessary fluff if it’s not mentioned in the job description. Resist the temptation of saying to yourself, “They’ll really like this bullet point even though it’s a bit unrelated.” That is not focus – that is distraction. Save that for the interview.
• You don’t need to mention every accomplishment, every key project, everyelement of your jobs. Analyze your audience based on the job description and what you know about their industry, and strategically include the most appropriate items and results in the most hard-hitting and clear terminology as possible.
• Having come from Fortune 500 talent acquisition myself, I’d rather see a 2 page resume that has only 5 bullets for each job – if each of those bullet points depicted a measurable business result – compared to a 4 page resume with 10 bullets for each job that told me everything under the sun about the applicant. We will chat if your resume provokes interest, rest assured.

So what happens when you write your resume with the sole purpose of landing an interview, instead of writing it to secure a job offer? Focus. Attack. Strength. Your resume lands you the opportunity to sell yourself. You, in turn, are the closer, and you secure the job . . . by way of your resume landing the interview. If you “write for the job offer,” there will likely be too much noise within your document, and when you only have 20-30 seconds, you don’t want noise.

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