Chapter 9: Job Applications
Learning Objectives
1. Represent skills, knowledge, and experience realistically for employment purposes.
iii. Prepare a targeted and persuasive cover letter and resume.
A résumé is the central document of your job application because it’s what employers focus on most when judging an applicant’s suitability for doing the job they’re hiring for. Does the candidate have the right combination of core and soft skills to do that job? Did they acquire those skills with the right combination of education, employment, and other experience? Are they able to put a document together in a clear, concise, correct, organized, and reader-friendly way? Unable to appear in person to make the pitch at this point, the applicant’s résumé conveniently answers these questions. It’s convenient because (1) it proves the applicant’s writing ability and (2) interviewing every applicant in person about their skills would be logistically impossible. The goal of the résumé, then, is to convince the employer to include you in the small selection of candidates they will interview to find the right person for the job.
Can you get to an interview without it? Sometimes a small-business owner will sidestep usual human resources (HR) best practices and hire without placing too much emphasis (if any) on the résumé. In most cases, however, the résumé is key to the hiring process. As said in the Ch. 9 introduction above, if that process is a communications test, the résumé, packaged along with the cover letter, is the written component. Employers demand perfection in the résumé for the following reasons:
- Enough applicants set the quality bar high by delivering a flawless résumé. When the hiring manager’s task is to whittle down a pile of a hundred applications to about five for interviews, even one writing mistake in a résumé gives them the reason they’re looking for to dump the résumé in the shredder, thinning out the pile a little further. They might even feel vindictive about it because a résumé riddled with errors is insulting; it says to the employer: “I’m not bothering to fix up my résumé because you’re not worth my time.” This is why writing errors often rank as hiring managers’ #1 pet peeve (Vandegriend, 2017). If 90% of résumés have errors and can be shredded upon first sight of one, the hiring manager’s job of sorting through a hundred applications then becomes selecting the five most qualified from among the ten flawless ones remaining after the quality-of-writing cull.
- A perfect résumé speaks volumes about how conscientious a job applicant can be about the quality of work they do. If a résumé is poorly written, the employer can safely expect a similarly poor quality of work if the applicant became an employee. That may be untrue and unfair, but the employer has nothing else to go on besides this document and the cover letter to make a snap judgment about whether the applicant would be suitable in the position. A perfect résumé shows that th