Honestly, your resume could be perfect and you may still have some trouble getting called for interviews.
Having a perfect resume does not insure a new job, but not everyone’s resume is perfect. Below I’ve listed 3 ways to know if your resume is actually good. By that I mean, your resume has the basics of what an employer would need to see in order to make a decision on whether you’re qualified and a good match for the position that they have available and you’ve done a good job of selling your assets.
- You’ve checked your spelling and grammar – Your accomplishments would have to be pretty amazing and well matched to an available role for a hiring manager to ignore spelling or grammar mistakes. If your resume contains spelling errors or grammatically incorrect phrases, it wouldn’t be a surprise to me that employers weren’t calling. Check your entire resume for mistakes and let a second set of eyes view it too.
- Your resume illustrates a good picture of who you are as an employee and how you can benefit the company you’re applying to – If you haven’t presented a good picture of who you are as an employee, your skills and accomplishments, you need to update your resume, because that’s likely the reason that you aren’t being called for interviews. Painting a picture of what kind of employee you would be and how you would benefit a potential employer is what gets them to call you.
- You’ve shown it to others and they’re impressed with it, visually – if someone can glance at your resume and want to read it, that’s a good sign! I’ve seen plenty of resumes that literally hurt to look at. The fonts and font sizes are random, there’s not a lot of white space and it’s a pain to figure out where to start reading it because the words appear to be on top of each other. When designing your resume, make sure it has consistency, balance and invites the reader to want to know more.
If you’ve checked your resume and it has all three of these components, what could be wrong? Why aren’t employers calling? I’ll give you a quick list below of why companies aren’t calling and in future blog posts I’ll expand my thoughts on some of them.
- They found a candidate that was more qualified
- They saw something in your resume that raised a red flag that wasn’t addressed in your cover letter
- They posted a position, but for some reason aren’t going to fill it
- They ended up filling the role internally
- They received too many resumes and are overwhelmed
- You haven’t posted your resume online for employers to find you on places like CareerBuilder.com or Indeed.com
- You’re not interacting on websites like LinkedIn.com
These are just a handful of reasons of why you haven’t been called for an interview. Some of these situations are in your control, but most are not. Organizations can have the best intentions on filling an advertised role and there are so many more reasons why it never happens.
If you’re unsure about how good your resume is, check out my Resume Audit Checklist. It will give you a list of items to use to check your resume to determine what it needs and how it can be changed.
Tell me about a time when you applied for the perfect job and never heard from the employer? What did you do? Let me know in the comments below.