The thinking is valid… to a degree.

Here is what they are trying to say, and my take:

Google is the new resume: Why use the boring old two page document that no one likes?  Instead, I should be able to Google you and see how amazing and qualified you are.

Here’s my take: The search results for someone on Google have a long ways to go before they will replace a resume, for many reasons:

• A resume is a succinct document that summarizes your career and qualifications, and should be customized for the industry, job title or company.  Google results are hodgepodge results, thrown together by a search engine, and not controlled by the candidate.
• A resume is accepted by the people making the decision, or weighing in.  The format is common and familiar.  If you have to run someone by 10 people, are you going to forward their Google search results and let people figure out what is good and what to ignore, or are you going to forward their resume?  Everyone knows what a resume is, and how to read it. Not everyone knows how to sift through search results.
• A resume is part of the ingrained (defined: Firmly fixed or established; difficult to change.) hiring process. When has HR even moved fast on anything, much less something as ingrained as the resume?
• Even if a candidate could control the Google search results (see Vizibility if you want to attempt this), many people don’t have anything that will come up when you search for them… which goes to the next point….

If you aren’t on Google (or LinkedIn), you don’t exist: Recruiters and hiring decision makers and influencers look for talent on search engines, mostly Google.  If they search for, for example, a project manager in Seattle who is certified and has 20 years experience in a certain industry, and that matches you exactly, but you don’t have a good Google presence or a LinkedIn profile that comes up, you don’t exist, they wont’ find you, and you will miss out.  In short, you don’t exist.

Here’s my take: Recruiters are not as shallow and simple as this. Many recruiters I know are networkers who spend more time on the phone and hanging at industry events. If they are looking for you, they will ask their network, who are hopefully your colleagues in your company and other companies in your area.  You’ll be harder to find, but that’s the challenge a recruiter accepts.  If everyone was easy to find in a Google or LinkedIn search, the value of a recruiter would be diminished.  Valuable recruiters specialize in finding the hard-to-find talent… whether they are online or not!

Will technology replace the resume?  Perhaps, eventually, but not anytime soon.

I can’t stress this enough.  When you are looking for some outside help to see how strong your resume is, I encourage you to get a professional resume writer to help you.

In that post I talked about how I thought I had qualified people reviewing the resume.  Whether they were hiring managers or HR experts, they reviewed it the wrong way.

Your resume is your professional marketing document. The person who critiques your resume should be trained to write these types of marketing documents.

When someone asks me to critique a resume, I cringe… because I’m not a professional resume writer.  I don’t have the right attention to detail.  I haven’t been trained and certified as a professional resume writer.  I am not up-to-date on current resume trends (yes, there are trends that are different than they were in your last job search).

If you want a trained resume professional to critique your resume, for free, click here.  It’s that easy!

I am appalled at the ads I’m seeing for professional resumes to be written for under $100.

Listen, there is a reason Nike, or some other major company, won’t pay you or me $100 to write their next advertisement. You get what you pay for, and they know it.

I think you get what you pay for with cheap resumes, also.  Let me generalize here: If you are paying under $100 for a resume, you are paying for a typist.

The thing is, you don’t want to pay for a typist.  You want to pay for a marketing professional.  You are the product/service, and you need to be represented in the best possible way.

A professional resume writer will help you with your marketing document (aka, your resume).

The higher you are (senior level professional, executive, etc.) the more important it is to get the right person to help you. Click here to get your resume critiqued.  Click here for the Career Resumes Job Search Checklist.

I was looking for someone to catch a grammar mistake, or a spelling error.

I was hoping someone would think it was awesome and walk it down to their boss, so they could offer me a job.

And of course, I was hoping someone would say “WOW!  You are way better than I thought you were!  I’m going to hire you!”

Pipe dreams, I know.

Unfortunately, I got praising feedback:

“This is awesome! You’ll get hired quick!”

and,

“Nothing to change, this is perfect!”

Of course, this was ego-stroking feedback.  It felt good.  It empowered me.  I was excited to use this resume I put together, myself.

But I said it was unfortunate… and here’s why: The people who got my resume were the wrong people to critique it.

Even though they had been hiring managers, and one was a senior level HR manager, they were the wrong people.

None of them critiqued for grammar or spelling.  They all thought “this is Jason… and he is awesome, and here is the data to prove it.”

They were biased going in.

I get asked to review resumes all the time.  Since I speak on job search and LinkedIn and networking, and I run a job search organizer (JibberJobber.com), and I’ve written some books on this stuff.  I’m in front of lots of job seekers all the time, and some of them think I’m pretty smart.

So why wouldn’t I review your resume?

Because I’m not detail oriented.

And I don’t know enough about your, or your industry, or the companies you are applying to, etc.

And I’m really not staying up on resume stuff, like a professional resume writer is.  Professional resume writers are not typists… they are experts in your personal marketing document (aka, your resume).

Go ahead and “get feedback” from your friends and family.  But until you run your resume through a real resume professional, who is giving you qualified feedback.  If you want Career Resumes to critique your resume, click here.

Be careful who you listen to!

And we do it wrong (or poorly)…. almost all the time.

Can you communicate just a little bit better? Communication in your job search is key.

It’s why job seekers spend hours working on their “elevator pitch.”

It’s why people pay to have a professional resume writer hone their 2 page resume (aka, marketing tool).

It’s why people pay to have an image consultant help them with their body image, clothes, etc.

It’s why people pay to have an interview coach help prepare them nail the interview.

It’s why people tell you to have a better handshake.

It’s why people do mock interviews, record them, and critique them.

Think about it – in your job search, most everything you do is communicating in one form or another.

How’s your communication?  Can it be improved?  I’d suggest looking for marginal improvements, one step-at-a-time.  Communicate better on purpose, and you’ll be a better, more successful job seeker!

Imagine you are a recruiter trying to fill a job (a job that is a perfect match for you, the job seeker).

Go to Google and do a search for the right candidate (which is you, of course).

Are you coming up on the searches?

You can’t use your NAME in the search phrase, since the recruiter doesn’t know your name.

What would you use?

Check out this very short post that shows how recruiters search using Google (another gem from Recruiting Blogs).

Now, try the search again, but a little more refined, based on that search.

It might be something like:

Seattle “project manager” resume

OR

site:www.linkedin.com (Seattle | Washington) “project manager”

Are you coming up?

If you are NOT, then what can you do to your profile, resume, website, etc. so you do come up?

(hint: figure out what keywords are most important, then make sure you have those in your profiles/documents so you have a chance of showing up when a recruiter is looking!)

His conclusion is summed up in this line:

“Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Hell yes.”

Very interesting.

Most job search coaches tell their clients to not spend time, or to really limit their time, to online job boards, and applying to jobs online.

Jeffrey, a recruiter, ends the post with his five step system, which is to network, network and network.  This is his “quick plan for doing all you can to get into a target company.”

But he argues that unless you apply online, in many cases, you can’t be considered as a candidate.  In the first comment, Valentino Martinez writes:

Some companies won’t interview you if you’re not in their Applicant Tracking System (ATS).  Why?  Employers are motivated by EEOC/OFCCP to treat/handle all job applicants the same (fairly).

Oh great, now we are dealing with government regulations.  So maybe we really do need to take this approach.

Read Jeffrey’s post for more on his three why’s:

1. So you get “in the system,”
2. So recruiters can find you when they search for candidates for other openings,
3. So you can easily apply to other openings, and get your resume in front of other recruiters.

This is an interesting, and seemingly solid, argument FOR spending time on job boards and applying there.

If only it didn’t take so long to apply on clunky systems

You’ve heard the job search is a numbers game, right?  It used to be, for sure.

Julie writes:

I had someone apply for 15 of our job openings the other day. Fifteen! And all the job openings called for completely different skill requirements. Before even opening this person’s resume I’m thinking: What a waste of my time. Just seeing those 15 messages in my inbox, I was completely turned off.

Read the entire post here – excellent advice from someone who knows!

Are you working HARD?  Or, are you working SMART?

I worked really, really hard, doing all the wrong things. But I worked hard, and at the end of the day I could say “wow, I did a lot of work today!”  But it was the wrong kind of work.  And it got me nowhere, except depressed.

Interviewer: on your resume it says you do this ____ and this_____. What exactly does that mean?

Me: Um…. um… it says that?  Where does it say that?

I had no idea what it meant. I had borrowed a resume from my dad, who had his resume professionally written.

I edited a lot of it, but in the list of characteristics or skills or strengths, I left most of it there. I was a general manager and though the stuff he had there applied to me, too.

It did, to a degree, but when questioned on one specific thing, I choked.  I made a mistake and was surprised to be questioned on it.

No, I didn’t get the job.

But from now on I’ll carefully think about the resume, my personal marketing document.

PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ THAT STUFF?

Yes, they do.  Even though we’re told they spend a max of 10 seconds on a resume, they might actually find something and call you on it.

So, read yours today.  Make sure it fits you 100%.  Look for:

• Things you might get questioned on, like I was.  Can you answer questions, preferably with stories, on every single thing on your resume?
• Typos and grammar.  I know, I know, you’ve done this before.  Here’s a tip I got from a friend who proofread a catalog regularly:  ”read it backwards.”  There’s something that happens when we read forward… we can easily miss spelling and grammar mistakes. Somehow our brain skips over them because the brain knows what it is supposed to say.  But if you read backwards you read one word at a time, out of context.  Try it the next time you have to proofread something.
• Proper resume language.  Like, in the bullet points we’re told to start them with action verbs, instead of something more passive.

These are just a few things to look for.  Clean it up, make it tighter, and as a favor to me, make sure you know what’s on your resume

It’s worth your time to read… this applies weather you are going on a boat, train or plane, OR if you are staying home but don’t plan on being tethered to your phone/computer.

In the article Alison talks about a few tactics (see here), including:

• Check your email (on a regular basis!),
• Have internet access,
• Make sure your cell phone works (especially if going overseas), and
• Have your resume accessible from wherever you are.

The last one reminds me of a friend who was in a serious job search but left home for about 10 days to go to his daughter’s wedding out of state.  Someone he met asked him for his resume and his first thought was “OH NO, IT’S ON MY HOME COMPUTER!”  He wasn’t going to be able to access his home computer for a while.  Luckily, he had his resume stored in JibberJobber, so that evening he got online and pulled it down, and was able to send it that same day.

Another great alternative or backup is to email yourself your resume, assuming you have a gmail or some other web-based email system.

Then, from wherever you are you can search for “Jason Alba resume” in your email system and you should have it right there, even ready to forward to someone else.

Don’t get stuck in a position where you are days or weeks away from being able to respond appropriately!