Posted By danielg86 ~ 10th September 2011
If you’ve recently graduated college and tried applying for jobs more than likely you’ve sent your resume to 20+ job listings a day and gotten 0 responses. The Process of getting response during this whole affair of applying for jobs is very challenging. You can’t even tell if human beings are looking at your resume.
This is the story about how I took my resume, made it more “usable,” and got a job because of it.
I started off with the problem that there was no useful information in my cover letter, so I over compensated by making my cover letter too long (2 pages). It was filled with all kinds of information related to marketing projects I’ve worked on. I sent that out to roughly 100 job postings over the period of a month. I got no interviews.
Action: I went back to the drawing board. I took my resume and reformatted it. I moved around all my relevant experience so that those things employers wanted to see were highest on the page. Things were out of order chronologically, but now I was making the information in my resume more usable, thus I was more likely to break through to the poor admin assistant sifting through 350 resumes for 4 hours in the morning.
Result: I sent out my resume another 15 times and one company bit. Interesting thing about this is that the relevant experience was only half way down the page on my resume. This says a lot about how far down the page the person evaluating resumes will go if they are not reading about what makes you a good fit for the job. I got a phone interview, then an in person interview. So I went down to San Jose put the good foot forward. Still I wasn’t thrilled with the results. Of my efforts, I’m seriously passionate about SEO and internet marketing and a resume isn’t going to communicate that.
I made al the way through the interview process, but because I was rusty on the SEO nomenclature I didn’t get hired.
I tried sending out this new resume and after about 20 sends, there was still the chirping of crickets in my inbox. Still no love. I decided my cover letter still sucked. I pouted a bit on Facebook, and got some great advice from a friend who works in recruiting, and happens to be the founder of a company called
Gving. Ideally I should have some bulleted points, outlining projects I worked on, and metrics showing how much my input created a positive outcome.
I didn’t have those metrics available, and anything I could dig up would not have been that impressive. While working at prospect match I learned that a sale is made on emotion, and I don’t necessarily need to justify the purchase (hiring me) with numbers, although it would be ideal. So I set about to making my cover letter more usable.
Action: I added bolded headlines above each paragraph on my cover letter w/ keywords describing what was in the paragraph, mostly buzz words, to allow the reader to scan my cover letter and feel they’ve extracted sufficient “useful” information to warrant paying attention to my resume. I knew the buzz words I chose would demonstrate that I know the industry lingo, allowing the reader to feel comfortable with me, because I was speaking in their terms, and indirectly demonstrating that I have experience in the industry that related to the position I was applying for.
Result: I sent that out for a day to roughly another 20 jobs, with in 3 hours I received an email back from a hiring manager who said they would like to meet me.
I liked that result so I decided to run a split test on my cover letters.
Action: I kept one cover letter at 2 pages in length, describing projects I’d worked on and talking about my passion for internet marketing. I then had a shorter version of my cover letter. It was a little shorter than a page, and had the bolded headers above each paragraph (the bolded parts were nearly a sentence and visually looked a little clunky).
Results: After the edits I got 2 emails back to set up an interview with in 24 hours. I’d sent a total of 20 resumes to companies I wanted to work for. During the final phase of my testing I’d gotten 5 interviews with in a week, while before the test it took me a month to get 1 interview. The short cover letter with the resume organized according to relevant experience got the win and had a 25% sends to interviews conversion ratio.
I’m now happily employed doing something I really enjoy. I get to tweak websites so they make more money (Conversion Rate Optimization).
