Resume Questions: You Asked, We Answer

This week, the team at at our site answers a few resumes questions sent in by our readers and visitors.

Getting a response from recruiters

Question: I don’t know if this is a common experience, but I don’t usually receive responses to my resume submissions. I would say about one resume in fifty actually results in an interview invitation from an employer. So if I do the math, it really doesn’t make sense for me to spend an hour carefully researching the company and tailoring every resume I send. It makes much more sense to just do a mail-merge and send out twenty at a time, like spam. Am I alone in thinking this?

Answer: You’re not alone. Many frustrated job seekers have come to this conclusion and switched their focus from quality and care to quantity and mass-mailing efforts. In our experience, real success lies somewhere between. Invest in the jobs you really want, and for the rest, just tailor your (beautifully and carefully written) template resume. Then attach it to your tailored template cover letter and send it off.

The importance of proofreading your resume

Question: I’m having an anxiety attack, and I’ll explain why. Just yesterday I showed my resume to a friend, and she found a typo in the third line of my summary. Here’s the problem: I’ve been submitting this version of my resume to dozens and dozens of employers over the past three weeks. I’ve been putting all my hopes into it and sending it off again and again, and I can’t BELIEVE I didn’t see this error. What should I do now?

Answer: Move forward, don’t look back. The resumes you sent have been sent, and there’s nothing you can do to call them back. You could re-apply to each of these jobs, but that would only call attention to your error. And besides, after three weeks, many of these jobs will now be staffed.

Learn from this moment, fix the error in your template, and keep moving. As you do so, keep a sharper eye out for small typos and problems, and let this experience humble you and encourage you to slow down and be more careful.

Our Resume Builder helps solve both of these problems by letting you create a polished resume that can be quickly reformatted to suit a variety of employers when you’re casting a wide net, and by providing editing help to catch errors and oversights that can sabotage your job search.