Why is no one responding to my resume?

Is there something wrong with your resume that you are not getting any responses?

I was asked this question today by a frustrated job seeker who wanted help in fixing her resume.

My response follows:

I would be more than willing to look at your resume and offer suggestions, BUT it is essential that you share with me the job titles and company names of the openings to which you have applied.

Without knowing to what and where you have submitted your resume, I have little clue as to what should be in your resume.

Your resume is only as good as the specific keywords it contains as they match with the keywords of the job posting or description.

Also, most importantly, your qualifications have very little to do with whether or not you get any response to your resume.

The resume gatherers, the people to whom you send your resume, are screeners. Their job is to scan quickly resumes for keywords and send on those that have all, or at least a majority, of their target keywords.

They only have seconds to review a resume or applications and don't have time to read much of anything let alone think about what they see. In fact, in many cases, they have computer software scanning and finding the keywords for them.

The overwhelming, 90% of the time, reason why you don’t get responses is simply that resumes get lost in the heavy volume of them, in many cases 1000s, that are sent by desperate job seekers.

Your odds of ever getting any response to your resume or application, regardless of your qualifications, without following up repeatedly, is less than one in one thousand or .1%.

So playing the odds by just sending in your resume and/or submitting your application and waiting for a response means you would have to send in a resume or apply to at least 1000 openings to get one response!

You’ve got 900 more to go.

And, better still, you have one hundred with which you need to follow up.

Discover and determine the contact information for the company holding the job opening. Knowing specific contact people within the company, especially the hiring decision maker(s), makes all the difference in getting noticed. And without getting noticed, you probably won’t get a response.

If the company is not clearly identified, then do some detective work based on clues in the job posting like an email address or the type of business and location.

Then follow up with additional information like faxing another version of your resume or emailing your Facebook or LinkedIn link or dropping off your resume in person.

Repeated follow up has now become a requirement in making contact after you have sent your resume or applied for the job.

Let’s stay in touch,

Walt

And stay in touch with me and JVS at www.jvsdet.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.