Facing a mountain of resumes, HR managers are searching for top talent. While a strong resume is crucial to stand out, overselling your skills can backfire. Nolan Church, CEO of salary data company FairComp and former recruiter for giants like Google and DoorDash, offers insights. He recommends avoiding these three phrases to boost your chances of landing the job.
Mr Church told CNBC Make It that people should avoid sentences with more than ’25 words’. “All of these sentences should be less than 25 words maximum,” Mr Church said. “Probably even shorter than that. Because the goal of a resume is for me to very quickly understand what you’ve done.”
He shared that recruiters have “three to five seconds” to go through each resume. “Time is the enemy in life and is the enemy in business,” the former Google executive told the media outlet. “The faster that we can move, the faster that we can solve problems.”
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Mr Church suggested that applicants should avoid a ‘word salad’ of keywords. People tend to “have this word salad based off of what the [job description] says,” Mr Church told CNBC Make It. If a marketing job requires candidates to implement strategic marketing, refine the company’s messaging platforms, and engage stakeholders, including every one of those terms in one sentence would be a bad move, he added. Instead, Church recommended creating a rule when writing bullet points under job titles: “You’re not allowed to use more than one keyword in a sentence,” he said.
Applicants should avoid writing a list of tasks. “I don’t give a s— about your tasks,” Church told the publication. The day-to-day duties of your job like emailing with your boss or creating your quarterly goals do not give a concrete sense of what you accomplished and how you helped the business move forward, he said. “The one I see all the time that just blows my mind is ‘coordinated meetings with X’. There’s no business impact for coordinating meetings,” Church told CNBC Make It.
Mr Church highlighted the list of things they should have in their resumes. He said people should highlight what they did that benefitted the business, like getting new clients or exceeding sales goals, and use numbers to complement it.
