Warning! Speed-reading zone ahead.

You’ve probably head the old adage (or a variation of it) that you have about 20 seconds to impress someone reading your resume or they’ll move onto the next person and throw yours out or hit the delete button, whatever the case may be.

It really depends on who is reading the resume I guess but in my experience I would certainly suggest that 10-20 seconds is a reasonable amount of time to expect that your resume will be seen by many of the people who might read it whether a hiring manager or recruiter.

This comes with a few provisos as least as far as I’m concerned…

If you have a special skillset or type of experience that is rare, I can say that I would spend a bit more time with someone even if their resume didn’t look great if candidates like this person didn’t grow on trees and there was a premium for people with the skillset or experience.

In IT we often found that experience with a certain platform or technology might help to put a person who would otherwise be considered average into the “must interview” category if they had experience that simply wasn’t easy to find.

In general terms though I would agree that when you have dozens or hundreds of resumes to read through, you’re most likely going to quickly skim most of them in less than 20 seconds and move onto the next one.

What eliminates you in 20 seconds or less?

There are a number of ways your resume typically gets eliminated in 20 seconds or less in my experience and here are the big ones:

1. Your resume itself: I can’t always quickly describe what a great resume “looks” like but I know what a crappy one looks like and they tend to go out the window and into the trash very quickly. We help people who help themselves and having a lousy looking resume doesn’t help anyone.

2. Your current job function: If you don’t immediately look like someone who fits the job you’re applying for, you’ll typically get eliminated because you not only don’t fit the job but apparently can’t read the job description and realize that you don’t fit. People don’t like wasting time with people who can’t follow instructions or who can’t apply for jobs that they’re qualified for.

3. Your education: I have dealt with employers who specifically won’t hire people who (for example) don’t have a university degree. Not a diploma. Not a certificate. A 4 year university degree. It might not be fair but that’s how they roll.

4. Your employers: Many employers want to hire someone who is working for a competitor and won’t settle for less. They typically won’t mention this in the job description of course but they’ll tell their recruiter(s) that this is what they want even if they don’t tell you. Some employers won’t hire people who are currently working for a big company or a small one, some won’t hire from certain companies or industries. It can get pretty confusing to be honest but it happens.

5. Your location: This is always a tough one for people to understand. I’ve had people from other countries emailing me their resume for a local job who get surprised when I tell them the employer is most likely going to hire someone local. And why wouldn’t they prefer someone local? Relocating isn’t something you do on a whim and employers know this so they tend not to put faith in people who live out of town, state/province or country. If you’ve already moved there, great. You’ll possibly be considered for the job but anyone can say “sure, I’ll relocate if I get the job” but if the hiring manager has been burned before by someone saying this, they won’t believe you.

6. Your writing: Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, even an ugly looking font can kill your chances and can often be the tipping point when you’re in the “maybe” pile but the hiring manager simply uses your lack of attention to detail to move you to the “no” pile. Your resume is your calling card and something the “little” things aren’t so little and can ruin your chances at a job interview. You might have the right experience that the hiring manager is looking for but unless you spell it out in a way that they can see, they might look past you if they don’t quickly that what you’re offering is what they need.

Here are some good qualities to look for.

How can you ensure you’re only working with the good ones?

I won’t bother mentioning the really obvious ones except in passing but for completeness you clearly want honest recruiters who you can trust and who aren’t going to fire your resume all over the place without your permission. That should be a given.

Here are the qualities of a good recruiter who in my experience are are most likely best-suited to help you find a new job.

1. They have a good relationship with the employers they deal with: Good recruiters deal with employers who they’ve placed people with before. When you have a recruiter who has placed multiple people in a company you’re interested in, chances are this means the company is happy with the recruiter and probably has staff who you might be able to speak with to learn more about the company before you commit to working for them. You obviously want recruiters who have a good relationship with the employers they deal with but I mention this with one proviso…in recruitment it is common for recruiters to deal both with employers and candidates and for recruiters to work on each other’s jobs so you might find that in some cases the recruiter you deal with isn’t actually the account manager for the hiring company but one of their colleagues is. The recruiter you’re dealing with should be able to answer questions you have regarding the job and employer but if they can’t they should get the answer from the account manager or put you in touch with that person directly. That way you’ll ensure this recruiter has the proper information to help you decide if the job is really of interest to you, which leads to quality #2…

2. They give you the proper information to help you do your best during job interviews: This means they give you more than just a job description too. Recruiters should be be able to tell you a number of things about the job and company you’re applying to that you wouldn’t necessarily know had you applied directly for the job yourself otherwise why would you bother working with a recruiter in the first place? Among other things they should be able to tell you why the job is open, what it pays, who the job reports to, the culture of the company you’re interviewing with and anything special skills or experience that the job requires (i.e. hot buttons) that the hiring manager is looking for. A lack of this information might suggest that the recruiter doesn’t have a very good relationship with the company.

3. They make you aware of jobs you didn’t otherwise know about: Many recruiters work on the same jobs other ones are but in some cases, you might be working with a recruiter who is a preferred vendor to an employer and in some rare cases might be the only recruiter working on the job. The last thing you want to do is waste time having 2 or more recruiters telling you about a job you already knew about which can increase the chance your resume gets sent for the same job and company more than once. You want to be dealing with recruiters who tell you about jobs that you didn’t otherwise know exist.

4. They don’t waste your time with positions that don’t match you: Sometimes in recruitment it can be difficult to determine 100% of the time whether a job will be of interest to a candidate and in some cases you might get presented with jobs that don’t interest you or fit you and you have to say no. If I wasn’t sure, I’d tell a candidate I wasn’t entirely sure but wanted to float a job past them just to be safe. But if you’re regularly getting jobs put in front of you that don’t match your skillset, experience, monetary requirements, etc it might be a sign that the recruiter you’re working with is no good. I recall working with some recruiters who would show me the resume of a job candidate for a job I was working on and in some cases it was unbelievable because the person in no way, shape or form fit the job and yet they were trying to tell me the person was a perfect fit. This stuff does happen. Not all recruiters know what they are doing.

How did you find my name?

One of the things that people often want to ask a recruiter is “how did you find out about me?” In other words, where did they find your name? In the old days before the Internet and social media it was harder to find people but these days most of us have some track record online so it’s a lot easier to find people than previously so perhaps this isn’t such an important question afterall. When I first got into recruitment in 2000 I recall many people asking how I’d found their name and mostly I think it was because they wanted to ensure their current employer didn’t know they were looking for a new job. As time went on fewer and fewer people seemed to ask this question because many already had their resume posted online, used LinkedIn, Facebook, etc and were already easy to find.

In staffing terms, recruitment refers to the process of looking for new staff.

A recruitment agency is a company that specializes in recruitment. They employ recruiters to find client companies who are willing to pay the recruitment firm to find their staff for them.

A recruiter is someone who recruits people to join their company or someone else’s company.

Typically a recruiter gets paid by the hiring company to help them find new staff and recruits people like yourself using various means.

One of the benefits of working with a recruiter – specifically a good recruiter – is that they often have access to information that can benefit you if you are being considered for a job that they are trying to fill.

A good recruiter has an intimate knowledge of their clients and what they want. They can shed light on specific aspects of a particular job that can help you get the job.

This is information that you wouldn’t otherwise know about if you had have applied for the job on your own or through other means.

As a recruiter I can tell you that this additional flow of information can be worth its weight in gold to you.

Taking a step backwards, being recruitable refers to your ability to catch the interest of recruiters and more importantly and by extension, hiring managers.

Being desirable in the eyes of recruiters and hiring managers can affect your ability to get the job you want whether you choose to use recruiters or not.

With the rise of the Internet, it’s become easier in many regards to “find” people. These days you can Google your own name to see what pops up. Last month I was trying to find a friend of my dad’s who we’d lost track of. I couldn’t find him so I searched for his kids and found his daughter’s contact information on her employer’s website!

Clearly, the increasing popularity of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like have also made it easier to find people. Posting your resume on multiple job boards, posting articles or comments on Internet websites can further increase your online profile.

Increasing your online profile can make it easier for people (ie. recruiters, hiring managers) to find you…mind you depending on what you’re saying and how you are presenting yourself online, that can both help or hurt you.

Ethics in the field of hiring, staffing and recruitment is based on a combination of things and depends on who is actually involved in the hiring process.

Certainly the job searcher, hiring manager and recruiter are just three possible people involved in a hiring decision.

As a recruiter, I try my best to gauge the truthfulness of comments by both job searchers and hiring managers and they presumably are gauging my truthfulness as well.

Commonly, job searchers often lie about various aspects of their resume ie. their salary, why they left their last job, their job responsibilities, their educational achievements, etc.

Hiring managers might lie about why they are looking to hire a new person ie. they might lie about why the previous person left the job they are trying to fill (if the last person who held the job was fired for something embarrassing like having an office affair or something like that, do you think the hiring manager will tell you the truth about why the person was fired? Me neither). Similarly a hiring manager probably won’t tell you that the previous person quit the job because they were bored or because they thought their manager was a jerk either.

A recruiter needs to find the truth and often needs to read between the lines of comments that are made to them by either the job searcher or the hiring manger.

Similarly some recruiters aren’t always capable of telling the truth 100% of the time either. Recruiters often have a reputation not much better than a used car salesman – no offense to used car salesmen – and sometimes it’s not difficult to see why.

Whether you’re a job searcher looking for a job, a hiring manager looking to fill a job, or a recruiter looking for a job searcher to fill a job, the truth tends to come out one way or the other.

As a recruiter, I have a hard time working with people I can’t trust and I’m usually a pretty good judge of character. I tell the truth when working with job searchers and hiring managers alike and I expect them to do the same.

There are plenty of honest job searchers, hiring managers and recruiters out there and life is just too short to waste time with people who aren’t trustworthy.

As a recruiter, I can tell you that what I’m about to mention can not only help you get more and better job opportunities to consider, but can also of course lead to more job offers to consider.

Here are some traits that I love seeing in job searchers that I’m dealing with:

They have a great personality: Granted, not everyone is chatty and not everyone has the same personality but I love dealing with people who are happy to speak with me and show enthusiasm. I’m always worried when I speak with people who are monotone and sound uninterested when speaking with me because chances are they’ll act the same way in an interview and that’s not good.

They value my time: And as a result I value theirs, too. I hate when I’ve helped someone find a suitable job opportunity with a client, they apply for it, I help them prepare for interviews and then they go into the interview and do something stupid like show up late or arrive unprepared. Then when I tell them they aren’t getting invited back for a second interview or aren’t getting a job offer, their reaction isn’t one of disappointment and they don’t apologize for being late or not being prepared but instead basically say “well, go find me another job to apply for” as if I’m going to drop what I’m doing and go through this time-wasting process with them again.

They answer the questions without me having to ask: I love when I get an email from a person looking for a job and in the email they tell me why they want to leave their current position, the money they’re looking for, the locations they’ll consider working in and the type(s) of position they want. I like dealing with organized people who know what they want and tell me up front what they want.

They know what companies they’ve already applied to: I hate running a job past someone and being told by the person that they’ve never applied to the company before but within minutes of emailing the person’s resume over to the hiring manager, having the hiring manager tell me that they got this person’s resume the previous week from another recruiter or that the person applied directly themselves. Some job searchers are very unorganized and some are just bad liars. Upon being told that a company already has their resume, the bad liars usually (unconvincingly) tell me that they can’t remember applying to the company or they admit that they did apply but because they didn’t hear back from the company, they figured it would be ok if I sent their resume over, too.

They only enquire about jobs they are qualified for: Too many people apply for jobs that they aren’t qualified for. You can quickly eliminate yourself from a recruiter’s good books by constantly calling and/or emailing them regarding jobs that you aren’t qualified for. The good job candidates are ones who recognize that they aren’t qualified for a job – sometimes I need them to tell me if they have enough of certain skills to apply for a particular job – and the best job candidates are ones who recognize that they aren’t qualified for a job…and then they refer me to someone who is. Which leads us to the last point…

If I help them, they help me: The recruitment business is about relationships and meeting new people and there is nothing better you can do for a good recruiter than help them when they’ve helped you. Referring a good recruiter to friends and other people you know – whether they’re currently searching for a new job or not, whether they’re currently hiring staff or not – is the best thing you can do for a recruiter. Anytime you can give a recruiter a few names of people you know is a good thing. When I help someone find a job and ask them for a few referrals, when they tell me they’ll give me a few and never do, that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. When I help someone, I like when they at least try to return the favor.

If you have been working with a recruiter(s) and suddenly find yourself not getting your calls or emails returned, you might be wondering if you’ve been blacklisted by them.

The truth is that some recruiters – like other people in your life I’m sure – are good at returning calls and emails and others aren’t. Many recruiters will only contact you when they have a job to discuss with you. Remember that recruiters get paid by the hiring company not by the candidate so if they have no job to discuss with you, they have no financial reason to speak with you. That’s the cold reality of the recruitment business.

Certainly it makes sense to keep in touch with recruiters and as a recruiter I feel that it’s good to keep in touch with good candidates – with emphasis on the word good. I’m referring to job searchers that the recruiter can place in a job with one of their clients – to see what they’re up to from time to time whether or not I have to job to discuss with them.

Not all recruiters feel this way though. Many will just call you or give you some time when they have a job for you and that’s it.

There are however some reasons why you may have essentially been blacklisted by one or more recruiters and here are some of the popular ones:

1. You’ve interviewed for one or more jobs with their clients and haven’t gotten a job offer from them. In other words, you probably did something during the interview that you aren’t aware of or you simply did poorly in the interview(s) and the recruiter doesn’t see value with working with you anymore. Remember, the recruiter gets paid if they help you get a job with one of their clients. No job for you, no money for the recruiter.

2. You don’t stop harrassing them. If you frequently call and/or email a recruiter and they keep trying to blow you off, you might not have gotten the message and so the recruiter simply stops working with you because you’re too high maintenance. I’ve had a few people who just won’t stop calling me and I end up not working with them as a result.

3. You’re not honest. A few times, I’ve caught a job searcher in a lie (ie. they lied about their skills, current salary, work status, why they left their last job, etc) and once the truth comes out, sometimes the lie is too big to ignore and the recruiter simply decides not to work with you anymore.

4. You’re not as good as your resume would suggest. As per point #3, sometimes people aren’t honest but in other instances they’re simply not that good. Sometimes you read someone’s resume, interview them and think that they are a good candidate but it isn’t until they hit the interview process that they get exposed by the hiring manager as a weak candidate. Often their resume makes them look better than what they actually are and when the person gets exposed as a weak candidate (or a dishonest one who embellishes their experience), it looks bad on the recruiter who most likely won’t want to make a mistake with that same person twice.

The issue of whether of not to disclose your salary to a recruiter is one of those topics that is often up for debate. You’ve probably been told to defer talking about salary in an interview with a hiring company as long as possible and this certainly makes sense.

A few months back I spoke about my experience when I attended an interview that was arranged by a recruiter without knowing the salary of the job going into the interview and what a waste of time that was.

In other words, a lack of information cost me and contributed to me wasting time and effort applying for a job I never should have.

The point of letting your recruiter know what sort of money you’re currently making and what you’re looking for is to avoid applying for jobs that don’t meet your requirements or conversely are way outside your abilities.

I can only think of perhaps a handful of times I’ve asked someone what sort of money they are making and not received an answer back. Most times people understand why I’m asking the question and give me the answer. In the few occasions where the answer isn’t given, a red light immediately goes on in my head and I wonder why the person won’t tell me what they’re earning?

Typically, the person says I should run jobs past them and they’ll let me know if it suits them or not based on what the job pays. There’s no way I’m playing that game. I’m not guessing what jobs to put past someone based on what I think they’re earning. I’m not wasting my time doing that.

Again though, this happens very rarely. Remember, when you’re dealing with a recruiter you’re not working against them. You’re supposed to be working together and telling them what you earn isn’t going to prejudice you in the eyes of the recruiter since the recruiter isn’t the one going to hire you.

In fact that opposite is true. It should help you avoid applying for jobs that don’t suit you (ie. it doesn’t pay enough, is beyond your level of experience).

As I’ve spoken with and met with more and more people during my time as a recruiter, it is interesting to see how some of the same sorts of things often pop up during the course of a conversation.

Specifically, people often think about things related to their career and to job searches that aren’t necessarily correct. Here are some of the common myths:

Recruiters get paid to help you get a new job: You don’t pay a recruiter so they’re not working for you. If you are paying a recruiter, you’re getting ripped off. Just like the person selling the house pays the real estate fees, the hiring company pays a recruiter, not the job searcher. Recruiters don’t get paid to help you get a new job. They get paid when they help someone – anyone – get a job with one of their clients. It could be you, or someone else, it doesn’t matter. Their job is to fill the job, not help you get a job specifically. If they help you get the job, great. If it’s another of their candidates who gets the job, that’s great too. Obviously that not great for you of course but the recruiter is happy.

Education can make up for hands-on experience: In my experience mostly as an IT recruiter, this isn’t the case. I’ve lost count of how times I’ve asked someone if they hands-on experience with a particular skill or platform and they respond by saying that they don’t have this experience but they took a course on it or they can learn it. Employers typically want someone who has the experience they are looking for unless such a person doesn’t exist. Taking courses and trying to learn it on the fly often doesn’t cut it.

Offering quantity over quality is preferable: Whether it’s on your resume or in the interview, written or verbal diarrhea – where you go and on and keep talking, hoping that something you say will catch the hiring manager’s attention – is a common way that people lose out on interviews and jobs. Listing every single course you’ve ever taken on your resume or just talking and taking up air in an interview but not actually answering the question that was asked are two common ways that people offer quantity over quality. These rarely help your cause but they often hurt it.

Instructions don’t matter: When applying for jobs, one of the easiest ways to eliminate yourself is by not following instructions. If the job ad asks for a cover letter, send one. If the application process involves answering 5 questions, answer them. If the job application deadline is in two days, try to get your application in the day before just to be safe but don’t miss the deadline. Not paying attention to simple instructions is often a sign to the hiring manager that you don’t pay attention to details.

Spam is good: Applying for 3 different jobs with the same company that have completely different skillsets and experience isn’t a great idea but this is something that happens frequently. I recall cases where I was looking for (as an example) a Network Administrator, Project Manager and Customer Service Representative with a particular client and get people applying for all three jobs even though the jobs should clearly attract different candidates. The thought that there would be someone who would legitimately qualify for all three jobs is absurd and yet people will email their resume over for all three when in fact they qualify for none of them. Typically all three of their emails end up in the deleted folder.

Working in recruitment has enabled me to meet many, many different people and many, many, many different kinds of personalities along the way.

How people choose to keep in touch is quite an interesting aspect of a person’s personality. Here a few different kinds of people in terms of how they keep in touch after they’ve made contact with me.

Which one are you?

1. The Missing In Action Job Searcher: This is the person who speaks with me once, maybe even meets with me in person and then disappears, never to be heard from again. They never call, never email, never tell me whatever happened to them. If I have a job to discuss with them, I’d certainly give them a call but I generally don’t call people just to say hi and to see how they’re doing. That’s their job. Follow up is something they’re supposed to do with the recruiter if they’re serious about getting help with their job search otherwise they become quickly forgotten.

2. The Whiner: This is the person who calls me and complains that they haven’t heard from me in a week and wonder what’s going on. Uh, I don’t have a job to discuss with you, that’s what’s going on.

3. The Harrasser: This is the person who calls me every day (for a few days anyways, until I stop returning their calls and they get the message). They call every day – often they’ll call several times a day and when I don’t answer the phone, they hang up without leaving a message and then try again a few minutes later. Thank God for caller ID…

4. The Emailer: This is the job searcher who never calls me, but simply sends an email to touch base every so often. I actually like this type of person because sending a quick email to touch base isn’t a bad thing and the truth is I often do the same thing. Sending an email of course means that I don’t have to respond right away – although I normally do anyways – and isn’t as intrusive as a phone call.

5. The Harrassing Emailer: This person has tendencies of both #3 and #4. Typically, they will email me and the moment the email hits my In Box and I hear the sound that MS Outlook makes when a new email arrives, I hear a second sound and it’s typically my phone ringing because in addition to emailing me, this person has called as well to ensure I got the email that they only sent 5 seconds earlier. Typically, they’ll say “did you get my email?” This would be the email that they’d sent 5 seconds earlier.

6. The Updater: This is the person who updates their resume three times a week and sends me an updated copy of their resume three times per week.

7. The Spammer: This rare breed will send a generic “I’m still looking for a job” email and will CC the email to 10 or more different recruiters. We already talked about netiquette and email rules a few months ago.

8. The Drop In Artist: This is another rare breed who will pop into my office unannounced just to say hi – they usually say they “were in the neighborhood” – and to see if I have a job for them. Typically, I’m just about to pop into a scheduled interview with someone else and I actually feel guilty when I have to cut the chat short with The Drop In Artist to attend the other interview even though it’s not my fault.

9. The Social Butterfly: This person starts working with me and starts getting my help to find a new job. Then I find out that they have interviewed with one or more of my colleagues previously without telling me, meaning I get into a dispute with my colleague(s) and then we have to sort out who is going to continue working with The Social Butterfly which just gives everyone a lot of grief. Typically, The Social Butterfly isn’t that great a candidate either. No offense.

Yesterday we talked about why you might consider using a professional resume writer.

Most recruiters are not professional resume writers so that right there is a good reason to not allow most recruiters to rewrite your resume.

From time to time, there will be occasions where a recruiter finds out that you have experience that is either not mentioned in your resume or is mentioned in a way that undersells what you achieved. I can think of numerous cases where I knew a particular job required specific experience and upon speaking with a job candidate, find out that they have the experience but either don’t even mention it in their resume or don’t really make it clear to the reader that they have this experience. In this instance, I’ll suggest how they add it into their resume to draw attention to it.

This only makes sense and is a benefit of working with a good recruiter since they can tell you what parts of a job description are “must have skills” that you should highlight in your resume and which skills are “nice to haves” that are perhaps not as important. When you simply read a job description and apply for the job yourself, you often can’t tell exactly which skills and experience is paramount and what isn’t as important.

One area that you need to be aware of though is the issue of when a recruiter tries to get you to overstate your experience or flat out lie in order to make you qualify for a job that you really don’t qualify for. Just like it’s not right to make stuff up yourself and lie on your resume or in an interview, it isn’t any better when a recruiter convinces you to do it.

I once worked with a recruiter who was renowned for this especially with clients he was working with. He’d often add stuff into a person’s resume without even letting them know. Other times he would convince them to change their job title or accomplishments to make it seem closer to what the job required even if it was a lie. He ended up getting fired for another reason so things caught up to him in the end.

But what’s the point in lying like this? If you’re applying for a job and lie about experience you don’t have, if this experience is really that important, it’s most likely going to come out in the interview that you don’t have this experience and if not, it will probably come out once you’ve been hired so either way you’ll probably get caught. If the experience isn’t really that critical then I wonder why you’d lie about it in the first place and risk getting caught! So in either instance, it really doesn’t make sense to lie since getting caught or exposed can end up causing even bigger troubles for you down the line.

Allowing a recruiter to help you tweak your resume to better match your legitimate skills and experience to the job makes sense. Allowing a recruiter to convince you to lie or choosing to do on your accord does not.