Most hiring professionals, from founders to recruiters, look at so many resumes and LinkedIn profiles that they simply don’t have time to carefully read every word of each one. This may sound like laziness at first, but VP-level positions these days tend to get 400+ applicants in the first couple of days. In floods like these, first-glance relevance is what differentiates those who land immediate interviews.
For senior-level candidates who could easily fill up a multi-page resume, it’s very important to custom-tailor your resume and LinkedIn profile details to the job you’re aiming for. This doesn’t necessarily mean a custom resume for every single job you apply for, as that would be understandably exhausting. However, it’s a great practice to at least have one resume for each “category”, and to tailor your LinkedIn profile to sound specific to the most ideal target.
A severe pruning of the resume isn’t the best approach here: Even in shorter format, the content should match the target. A four-page resume with a specific spin toward the target role is vastly more effective than a general “hard-hitting” short-form document.
Ben Lewis
Comments