More Resume Trickery!

BOSTON, MA - Today I was looking for a resume with the following keywords:

coremetrics omniture SAS analytics decision store applications research merchandising behavioral usability “user experience” abandons consumer content agency multichannel dashboard statistics mining segmentation email testing

And glory be!  After reviewing roughly 200 resumes, I found a guy who's introductory "Experience" paragraph included nearly every one of these terms.  Yet just before I bookmarked it (meaning that the resume had made the all-important first cut in my search process), I glanced down into the resume's body to see that only THREE of those terms actually appeared in the candidate's detailed work history.  He had keyword stuffed the rest.  >delete!!<

One bad apple and now I have to have a stupid policy:  From now on, the only part of a resume I will review in the first ten seconds is the actual work history section, the part that can be -- and will be -- verified later by your references.
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Comments

[Michael]

lol Good policy. I send out resumes and because of guys like this it is so hard to stick out, a bunch of half asses flood the market.

[Harry Joiner]

Here's the thing: I work with the world's greatest online marketers. For real. Nobody knows online marketing better than my candidates, many of whom are the VP's of Ecommerce for America's best known retail brands. And of course, many of my would-be candidates are aspiring VP of Ecommerce.

Having said that, most of the candidates in my space have learned how to game the system by optimizing their resumes for databases like Monster. They know how to get found.

So a typical search for a Database Marketer could yield 100 results (depending on how tight I want to set the parameters).

Yet there is a difference between having 25 keywords jammed into the front or back of your resume just to get picked up by the search engine, and having ACTUAL experience in your work history.

So from now on, I am going to look at the work history only. That way, I can ask the candidate point blank: "It says here you were involved in database marketing while at Company X. Give me an example of what you did ... What actions did you take? ... What were the results? ... Be specific."

I don't care how long a candidate's resume is, or how many bullet points they have on their resume as long as they can back it up with CONCRETE examples of how they actually did the work and could REPLICATE those results for my client.

Harry

[Tony]

Harry,

This surprises me.

I for one, have crafted mine to specifically account for those things I may have experience with, but are not reflected in my 'work experience', as I couldn't possibly add it all. Or better yet, it gives a more global snapshot of my skills and abilities, which I hope is the hook that gets them to read the rest.

Assuming most recruiters have had a similar experience, am I just distracting them with my opening paragraph, which potentially could prevent their review of the rest of the resume????

Love to hear your thoughts,

Tony