To all the candidates out there, Career advice in a down economy
Bradley Savoy October 8, 2008
With the stock market continuing to decline and unemployment continuing to rise, this is a time when the inbox of many recruiters are filled with more applicants then they can manage. I’m working on some senior level positions within our company and I’m frankly suprised that some of the basic elements I see missing from some of the applicant resumes and their conduct.
Here’s some advice I’ll give from being a recruiter and HR person for my entire career. These are just the top 3 I’ve seen in the last few weeks. While some of this may seem basic, there’s still a suprising lack of these in the market.
1. Put months of employment on your resume, not just years. We’ve been in a recession for the past year, and the employment market has been struggling for the last couple of years. Companies are downsizing, being bailed out, or merging every day. No recruiter is going to be suprised that a strong employee was affected by any of these events, and that your employment may have been less than a year in length. When you don’t put months on your resume it leaves us wondering how many months you were there? Was it a year, 3 months, 6 months. This matters especially if your last role was an intriguing one that built on some experience you’ve had, or gave you new skills. If you entire resume is nothing but years listed and not months of those years, then it becomes more suspect.
2. Be responsive, courteous, and flexible, even if employers are not. I know you’re thinking wait a minute, recruiters won’t call me back, they can be rude, so why should I be. Look at it as taking the higher road to ignite courteous referrals based on your reputation. If you’re treated poorly as a candidate by a prospective employer, then you’re going to tell your network about your negative experience. This adverse affect on their candidate pool will be fealt over time, and you don’t want the same thing to happen to you. If you take the high road, the least that will happen is that if you’re declined the recruiter may remember your attitude and refer you to a colleague at another company, or move you to the top of their potential candidate pool for other positions.
3. Do your homework on the company, and ask intelligent questions. In every screen I do I ask candidates to tell me what they’ve learned about the company they’ve applied to. 85% of the time they have not even looked at our website and done research on us, and if they have they haven’t garnered enough information to ask thought provoking questions about our environment, culture, career paths, etc. When a candidate has done research and asks good questions it’s a strong sign that they will approach their work in the same diligent manner in which they prepared for a simple phone screen.
Perhaps my next post will flip the script onto the recruiters desk, and look at gaps in service levels and conduct there, stay tuned.
Posted in Recruiting, Workforce Management
