Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance.
Almost every time I'm given advice (by people who should know, by being SHRMs having X years experience as a hiring manager) that isn't taylored to a specific reader, I learn yet another hardline contradiction of somebody else's advice. For example, another commenter here asserted that you should use sentences (to put keywords in perspective/context), which I've heard multiple times, but I have far more often been told to use phrases and keywords because sentences take too long to read. Proponents of each seem to view it as a MUST, and auto-reject anything that looks like the other. This same pattern holds for almost every bit of résumé advice I've ever gotten.
Some people even say to submit multiple different copies with different style variations "so that one might get through, while others say that if they receive more than one for the same role, they discard the candidate.
["Include $this!" | "NO! Never include $that!]
There is no Win.
Only "do a thing, until somebody tells you to do a different thing".
> Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance.
Often you can figure that out from the job description.
Rarely. There's almost never a "Don't format/say like X; do it like Y instead." analogue.
Instead, completely arbitrary rules are in play with hard disqualifiers unshared. Things like:
"Every job should have at least four bullets."; "But only one page, or I chuck it"; "But-but, if it's only one page, _I_ wonder what they've been doing with their life (except new grads), and chuck it."; "Don't include more than title, company, and duration for irrelevant jobs."; "But any job without details looks like they're hiding something or didn't accomplish anything there."; "Start with a mission statement!"; "Never waste my time with a mission statement."; "ALWAYS include a cover letter, or I chuck it."; "NEVER waste my time with cover letter, or I chuck it; if it's worth saying, it should be on your résumé."; …
Almost every time I'm given advice (by people who should know, by being SHRMs having X years experience as a hiring manager) that isn't taylored to a specific reader, I learn yet another hardline contradiction of somebody else's advice. For example, another commenter here asserted that you should use sentences (to put keywords in perspective/context), which I've heard multiple times, but I have far more often been told to use phrases and keywords because sentences take too long to read. Proponents of each seem to view it as a MUST, and auto-reject anything that looks like the other. This same pattern holds for almost every bit of résumé advice I've ever gotten.
Some people even say to submit multiple different copies with different style variations "so that one might get through, while others say that if they receive more than one for the same role, they discard the candidate.
["Include $this!" | "NO! Never include $that!]
There is no Win.
Only "do a thing, until somebody tells you to do a different thing".