Stefanie Fackrell has spent about 15 years in the recruitment business and has worked with tech giants such as Google, Apple, Samsung, and Nvidia. In her career, she has analysed “thousands” of resumes and one of the best pieces of advice she has for job seekers is to use a "boring" format while writing resumes.
"Make it boring,” she told CNBC Make It, adding that the resumes should have “no colors, no charts, no graphs, no pictures.” Instead, the current HR consultant suggested using a simple, straightforward format that lets the job seekers' accomplishments speak for themselves.
“When I used to work at Google, people would always submit artistic resumes with charts and the Google colors,” Fackrell said. Instead of writing a list of titles and accomplishments, they’d split their resume into columns and quadrants. Fackrell believes that by creating these colorful resumes, “you’re just being a little gimmicky”. Some of these resumes are also “not easily readable,” which makes the applicants' qualifications harder to discern.
Fackrell had worked with Google for about seven years between 2011 and 2018, before moving on to work with Apple, Nvidia, and Samsung.
Pointing out how an ideal resume should be, she told the publication: “A resume is showcasing you in a 10-to-60-second format on paper.” Telling a compelling story and being as clear and concise as possible “is what’s going to win you in a sea” of other applicants, she said, adding that while listing powerful accomplishments, the document must not be more than two pages long.
Fackrell also said that she considers it to be a red flag if candidates list their daily to-do list under each title. “Where a lot of people make mistakes on their resume is they’re listing out their daily job duties,” she told CNBC Make It. Instead, the resumes “should be a list of your accomplishments, mixed in with some job duties.”
Recruiters don’t need to see that you wrote emails and coordinated meetings. They need to see that you completed critical projects, brought in revenue and generally helped the company grow.
Listing out job duties alone not only leaves hiring mangers wondering how you contributed, it makes them think “there wasn’t a whole lot of effort put into” writing the resume, says Fackrell. To a recruiter, that doesn’t bode well for the kind of effort you’d put into the job itself.
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