Do you get enough calls on your resume?

Recently, a relative of a friend contacted me to review his resume. He said he wasn’t getting the type of response that he wanted.

First problem – he wanted to be a Software Engineer yet all the project titles he worked on lead recruiters to believe he was a QA Engineer. You can guess that he got a lot of calls for QA work but nothing for software engineer work. He was in fact a software engineer, he just happened to work on some projects to help develop QA software. Moral of the story: Not knowing what recruiters are looking for or just flat out mislabeling your experiences will cause the wrong kind of calls to come in.

Second problem – he wasn’t getting enough calls. He was not leaving anything to the imagination on his resume; he just through all the details at them. In sales we call that throwing up on the client. Yes you have to be noticed and you do that by giving the crowd what they want to hear. So put that you know C# and JAVA languages on your resume. If you want to be nice to the recruiters you can spell it out, but then again if you’re a marginal candidate (meaning you’re close to the qualification minimums) then your resume might be discarded without you knowing.

If it were me, I’d want a phone call. Especially if you have been job hunting for a while, you’ll appreciate a conversation. So tell a good story that is captivating and makes them want to know more, instead of a boring detailed account.