7 Great Ways to Ensure No Recruiter Ever Reads Your Resume

Posted on ERE Exchange Community by Sarah Welstead on June 2, 2009

I
don't know what the heck's happened in the past couple of weeks, but
the flow of Egregiously Bad Candidates has increased considerably.

The thing is, after I finish laughing at some of the emails we
receive, I do feel kind of sorry for these dingbats, because they seem
determined to ensure that no recruiter gets past the subject line of
their email, let alone ever takes them seriously as a candidate.

So to these job-seekers, I offer the following:   The 7 things most
guaranteed to ensure a recruiter never looks at your resume, let alone
calls you.  Please, read this before you send out your next
job-hunting-related email:

1. Send a blind email to a recruiting company that doesn't recruit for your profession.
   Today I got a really well-written - if really, really long - cover letter from a guy who really wants a position as a senior chef in a 5-star hotel, preferably in Halifax.
   
   Well...we
   don't recruit for the hospitality industry (a quick check of our job
   board would tell you we specialize in recruiting recruiters,  and HR,
   Supply Chain and IT professionals), and while we are located in Canada, we don't have offices in Halifax. 
   
   So I know this guy just Googled 'recruiting companies' and sent emails to every company that turned up.  Whatever.
   
   


2. CC a whole lot of people without hiding their names or email addresses.
   You
   know the people who do this - the CC field is jam-packed with like 50
   names and email addresses - would be the first to complain if you
   revealed their email address to a zillion other people.  Not
   sure how un-email-literate you have to be to fail to use the BCC field,
   but you're clearly too email-illiterate for our clients. 
   


3. Send your resume to 'info' @therecruitingcompany.com instead of to a real person or the 'proper' job application address.
   At
   our office, I'm the person who receives all the emails that go to
   info@head2head.ca - in other words, I'm the one who gets basically all
   the junk mail.  If you're sending an email to 'info' at our address, I
   know you haven't taken two seconds to visit our website, which brings
   us to...
   


4. Don't visit our website before you send your resume.
   I don't get this one.  Every single 'job search tips'-type list always
   says "Visit the company website before you send your application!  You
   will learn valuable information which will will tell the
   recruiter/potential employer you care enough to do your homework!". 
   
   Is
   it that some candidates still feel that it's nothing but a numbers game
   - that if they just blast every recruiting company with random emails,
   they'll eventually hit employment gold?
   
   Because nothing could be further from the truth.


5. Don't refer to what you do or what kind of job you're looking for in your cover email.
   This week alone I've received 14 emails that consist of a resume attachment.  No subject line, so 'Dear Ms Welstead', nothing
   to indicate what these emails are about.  Guess what?  If you're too
   busy to write one sentence about what kind of job you want, I'm too
   busy to open your attachment. 
   


6. Include a sentence like "I've been looking for over 12 months but no one will hire me..." in your cover email.
   Sure,
   I'm not going to delete your email quite as quickly as I do in #5,
   above, but here's what happens:  I immediately think "What the heck is
   wrong with this person that no one wants to hire them?" - and then I delete the email, because I'm not putting Debbie Downer in front of our clients.
   


7. Attach your resume in WordPerfect.
   I'm sure you can't believe this happens, but it does.  More often than you think.  Even if I can
   use my document converter to open your WordPerfect resume, all I'm
   thinking is:  Are you making an anti-Microsoft statement, or are you
   telling me that your computer skills stopped circa that 486 you had in
   1994?  Either way, we've got a problem (not least because Microsoft is
   a client of ours - but then, you'd know that if you hadn't done #4,
   wouldn't you?).

3 comments

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   Peter Radloff
  
  1
  point
  
  1 hour ago
  

  Agreed
  Gary - Don't DARE send me an email with the job and company name you
  just applied for ten minutes ago. I'm not going to read the resume at
  all. I couldn't care how good the person is. Attention to detail is a
  must have in every role.

  
  

  Also, let us remember the person who feels it necessary (and this is most prevalent in the technical world) to bold every third word on the resume.  Love that.

  
  

  Great article!

  
  
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   Sarah Welstead
  
  1
  point
  
  2 hours ago
  

  I haven't had the ZIP file attachment yet, but I'd forgotten about the people who copy and paste emails from other jobs! 

  
  

  Good lord.

  
  
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   Gary Kaufman
  
  1
  point
  
  2 hours ago
  

  Sarah,

  
  

  Bravo!  You were spot on.  I can add to the list (as I am sure others will).

  
  

  8. Use a templated (or copied and pasted) cover email that uses the
  job title or company name from a previous job you applied to.

  
  

  9. I agree about those that do not refer to the job in the cover
  email.  How about those that leave the body of the email blank/empty!

  
  

  10.  Attach your resume as a zip file

  
  

  Gary Kaufman

  
  

  Sr. Recruiting Manager

  
  

  Office Depot