Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president of people operations for the past eight years, would know.
Google sometimes gets more than 50,000 resumes in a single week, and Bock has personally reviewed more than 20,000.
Friday, September 19, 2014
Google's Head Of HR: These Are The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make On Your Résumé
Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president of people operations for the past eight years, would know.
Google sometimes gets more than 50,000 resumes in a single week, and Bock has personally reviewed more than 20,000.
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17 comments:
The presentation of resumes are important; particularly in the business of entertainment. An unorganized, messy, or overly complicated resume can reflect a negative connotation on the actor. it can also allow the person reading the resume to make stark judgements of the persons character in how they work and how they are in life based on their resume.
Making a resume is something that has always been so much fun for me. It’s a piece of paperwork that is worth the time and effort I put into making it so precise and particular. I what I appreciated the most out of this article was the idea that you have one page per ten years of experience. I don’t see many two page resumes in theatre, often everyone has just one page, but I think if you’re applying for a job as an artistic director, or as some other head of a company, that’s an exceptional way way to organize your experience. This also, however wonderfully highlights that if you can organize a one page resume, you know how to prioritize information as well as summarize. The resume really is just trying to get you an interview. I always make sure to put one small thing on there that is a little out of the ordinary, like that I can play the ukulele, and nine times out of ten, that’s what we’ll end up talking about in an interview.
Resumes are kind of a funny thing. They’re very important because they represent a person’s whole work experience and skills, and the way that a resume is organized and how the information is distributed can tell a lot about a person. On the other hand, most people I know don’t like making their resume because there are no specific guidelines but there’s still a right and wrong way to do it. It’s an opportunity to effectively showcase and market yourself, but if done carelessly it’s also an opportunity to give a bad impression and not get hired.
The typos tip is the one that comes up most frequently, and that’s because it is very important! A resume with typos immediately conveys that the person either doesn’t care about neat presentation, or isn’t thorough enough to present themselves in the right way. This matters to a potential employer because they want you to represent their company in a good way, and typos are not something they want to be recognized for as a company.
While some of these tips have been repeated in articles seemingly since the dawn of the resume, and in multiple green page articles, one stands out as something I have not seen before - the fourth one. Not revealing confidential company information is an interesting one, it makes sense that this would set a bad precedent that would throw red flags up in a hiring managers mind, but it is unclear to me exactly how this is done. There example is good, but I'd like to see some more so I can understand better how to avoid this trap.
I cannot count the number of artistic resume's I have seen. If a resume is good, it will wow a potential employer with it's attention to detail (no typos) and how well it conveys your expertise in an area. Presentation is important, but what you are really showing off is the content.
That being said, as someone who has made oodles of resumes, I totally understand the desire to bulk! I want to be the best person for the position, and if I let myself go wild I would include every volunteering job and every shred of an award. But I found that including every single honor only really diminishes the weight of each one individually. Editing is a vital part of showing of your skills.
Building a solid resumé is vital to the entertainment industry (as well as every industry, but especially the arts). I'm intrigued by the fourth point, in which the author says that 5-10% of resumés reveal confidential information about other companies. It really is a tricky tightrope, because you need to be able to sell yourself while still maintaining that they'd be lucky to have you: all in all, you need to sell the idea that this relationship would be mutually beneficial.
I find it akin to getting into university. For a drama school, students obviously need to supply a resumé in order to be considered. Figuring out what to put on my first resumé was a daunting task. Some people just don't care what you did five years ago.
Ultimately you just have to represent yourself the way you want to be represented, and not how you think they want you to be represented. If you lie, no matter how small (and I mean even about interests and the like) then the employment won't last long, either as a result of broken expectations or sheer misery.
It's interesting to hear what someone who has frequented a high volume of resume's cares about. A lot of the common resume disparage IE typos, length, and lies really stem from what I feel is a place of common sense. Don't seek employment with paperwork that shows you don't pay enough attention to you work that you can't catch misspelling. Don't break standard business practices by have a two page resume because you think all of your experience is so important you can't trim it down. And the most blatantly obvious one, don't lie! An employer doesn't want a deceitful employee? What a shock! How can anyone think that the best way to get employed is based on honesty and attention to detail.
A good resume is very important because it is your first impression on a company. If you seem disorganized in your resume they will think that is how you will be on the job. These tips seem very basic, but they are often overlooked. The person looking at your resume is most likely looking at a lot of other resumes as well. If yours has misspellings or is too long they will just move onto the next one and not even consider you for an interview. It is very important that it is not too long because no one has the time to read a really long resume, so they might not look at it at all.
Although most of the comments and tips made in this article are not new information, it was nice to hear these points again. I try to update my resume every few months but every time I do i constantly find myself having to reformat as well as look at how pleasing it is to the eye. I've seen the difference between a good resume and a bad resume and you can really tell the difference. I agree with the author about the little things that stand out and really transform your resume.
The guideline about one page of resume for each ten years makes a lot of sense. This leads into the perspective that the goal of a resume is to get you an interview, not get you a job. To me, that means the resume should be very direct and clear and not overly-engineered. It is often easy to try to jam-pack as much information in your resume as possible but it really isn't useful. The commentary about formatting is interesting as with theatrical design resumes, there's a balance between coming off aesthetically pleasing but also demonstrating you can communicate effectively visually, which, theoretically, both should go hand in hand.
I am amazed by how many resumes Google gets a week, but not surprised. Although this may be off topic, it's fascinating to me to think about what sort of infrastructure and staff they must have to cull through all that paperwork.
I think in this article he makes a lot of good points, but I dont find any of this information particularly original. I mean its nice that its coming from someone with such a high caliber job, but when were interviewing for CMU we were basically told the same things. The one point that I thought was rather interesting was the one about the confidential information. This seems like a fairly obvious point to me, but I did like how he drew the distinction between the letter of the agreement and the spirit. I thats often the problem with contracts these days, that everyone is always trying to find and exploit loopholes.
I think the best point he makes is that a resume is just a staring point of reference, not an end all. Often with my own resume I feel pressured to put all of my work experience in so I can illustrate my capability, but really a resume should just emphasize a couple of good points, and get your foot in the door as a potential candidate. Landing the job can always come later when you express your skill and work ethic through an interview.
What this article talks about is simply getting down the important stuff that every employer is looking for: qualification, honesty, reliability, ability to communicate concisely, and serious work ethic. When you deconstruct it thats all a resume really is- a way to tell a potential employer I'm probably what you're looking for, now give me a chance.
I've read a lot of articles about resumes now, and a lot of information isn't new. But then there are always the most obvious things people forget, like typos. Or some not so obvious ones, like revealing confidential information. I would think it'd be obvious that people shouldn't give away secrets. On the other hand, it may not have been intentional, if that's the case, I would really like some examples so I know to never accidentally do that in the future (when/if I learn company trade secrets).
I am currently in a professional writing class, the first project for which is a resume/cover letter package for a particular job. I am so glad that, in theatre, we rarely have to deal with the type of NDAs and other confidentiality problems that other industries do. We were workshopping resumes in class and an IS major's resume had very very very little in the way of actual specifics, and when asked about it, he said it was because they would all violate NDAs. I can't imagine trying to find specific, engaging, action oriented ways to sell your skill sets without being able to reference actual projects on which you've worked.
The not lying advice is also really important (and obvious!). It's a kind of fine line between phrasing your accomplishments persuasively and making them up. I tend to downplay mine as a result, which isn't very good either, but it's also important to realize that each iteration of your resume, once submitted, ends up somewhere in the ether forever. Even if you revise down statistics etc. on a subsequent draft, if a prospective employer finds an old copy somewhere (the world is very small), you've screwed yourself.
I usually try to read one of these professional articles a week, and this one, although it made some really good points, made one that really bothered me. The idea that resumes should be in just black and white is dumb. We were sitting around at my job this summer looking at the resumes of other people who went for our jobs and other people who worked there, and our bosses were telling us the pros and cons of different resumes. I can honestly say that I would not have gotten that job if my resume was in black an white. However, mine was purple, so I got it. Even at the interview, one of the interviewers said to the other "which one is he?" and the response was "the one with the purple resume." I think stuff like that is super important in getting noticed and to making it past the first round of resume choosing. I'm not saying that you should make a giant wordart header using comic sans (please don't), but you should make your resume unique to you. As my boss said, your resume and business cards are the first example of your work that a prospective employer sees. Besides that though, the rest of the points in the article were useful. I think that the one about lying is super important, especially because it can be so easy to accidentally lie during the fluffing up process.
Similarly to Joe, I was surprised to see the tip about revealing confidential company information. It seems like that sort of information would be hard to squeeze in on a resume, but I don't doubt that people do it with the intention of seeming well informed. Resumes are tricky to write. You are trying to fit all of your experiences onto one page while still being concise and sounding qualified. It is important to keep yourself in check and away from making stupid mistakes.
Resumes are a huge opportunity for people of every career. If done well, they allow for a huge bonus in the possibility of getting hired. Yet at the same time, the stakes are so high that there is an even greater risk that comes along with the pressure of making the best resume. The idea of condensing yourself into a single page of your experiences is often daunting because of the responsibility you have to yourself to land positions and strengthen your career. However instead of viewing resumes as a potential threat, I think it would be all the more advantageous to view them as a remarkable opportunity to show hiring professionals an arrangement of your best successes. The resume itself is also an amazing insight into a person. While the content is of course important, the layout, the attention to detail, and the effort that went into the resume also reveals plenty about the person applying for that position. I think it is absolutely necessary to put all your effort into your resume in order to illustrate the passion and determination you have in your professional life.
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