RECRUITMENT – RESUME LENGTH WINS:

What Happened To Locating The Right Fit?

In spite of best intention, or what anyone purports about “locating the right fit”, resume length overshadows and drives nearly every facet of recruitment.

As a result, candidate resumes are held back in favor of shorter, more “COMPLIANT” resumes (discussed below). In other words, this standard prevent hiring managers from meeting the TRULY qualified jobseekers. It’s factually causes greater attrition, customer impact and loss of reputation.

This length standard had originally been introduced and adopted to address a resume length problem. Jobseekers were chocking their resumes full of unnecessary and irrelevant information.  In other words, including far too much. Resumes contained either extraneous or nonessential details.

Therefore, it had summarily been determined that omitting unnecessary details would make for an easier, more rapid, hiring process. As with many things, speed was the driving factor.  Unfortunately, this didn’t quite workout to everyone’s advantage.

After that, this resume length (standard) became the paramount guiding principal for recruitment (ref: An Unthinking Hiring Marching Part I).  This literally, and unfortunately, became the senior rule driving recruitment practices.  Observably, this even overshadowed dozens of other, far more important, resumes health practices.

The Transformation

Overnight, the concept of “How much could be included” transformed into the mindset of “How much should be cut?”

Let’s be honest though, maintaining a shorter, more concise, resumes does seems fairly reasonable.  After all, who wants to make a career reading long-winded resumes?

Regrettably, this never became an effort to improve RESUME HEALTH!  Just “make ’em shorter.“

This rapidly achieved widespread popularity with 3rd Party recruitment firms looking to make a simple percert.

Scores of articles and websites teach and profess best resume practices. However, LENGTH, LENGTH, LENGTH is what recruitment agencies latched onto and drive.  As a result, this made it quite simple and easy for anyone seeking employment to have their resume, packed with sufficient buzz words, short-listed to the hiring manager.

Paraphrasing a few different websites, they state, ‘hiring managers look at your resume for only 6-8 seconds, so keep it short’.  They further state, “…one page [resumes] will be sufficient and is a widely accepted ‘best practice…’”.

THE HIRING MANAGER’S BURDEN:

• • Your hiring managers receive scores of resumes tailored to for 1-2 pages – in other words, significant numbers.
  • As a result, hiring managers are typically interviewing partially qualified candidates, with sheets containing a prescribed number of buzz-words.
  • Hiring managers consequently are forced to settle for less qualified candidates.
  • They also get the impression qualified candidates are scarce or do not exist – by survey: 70% says talent has gradually worsened.
  • As a result, qualified candidates bounce off this unthinking recruitment machine.

In conclusion, hiring managers are seldom introduced to truly qualified candidates.  Why?  Their resumes do not fit contemporary length standards.

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