SEO for HR

I was talking with a friend who is in the middle of a job hunt, and he was reflecting on the wide variation in advice he’s been given. Several professionals and “headhunt consultants” reworked his resume multiple times, leaving him with a document that an ideal 1-3 pages, while being completely professional and casual, and all topics are covered in narrative style complete with ‘hierarchical’ bullet points.

In other words, he got a whole lot of opinion, and very little useful direction. Even old adages such as “It’s not what you know but who you know” are getting debunked now.

My friend has decades of experience in television, and knows of a couple openings at Fox News Channel, where he happens to “know people.” Despite the advice of his job gurus, the people at the network said “Don’t bother with a paper resume. Nobody reads them.”

This is true. Most big companies don’t bother with paper anymore, but not for the reason you think. They can sort and slice and dice the entries, and bring up only the ones that have certain key words. “Managerial” might be an important word, and “budget” would be another. It’s a smart way to get to the best candidates, but it brings a whole new set of questions to the mix.

The Machine Readable Resume

First of all, once SEO becomes mainstream in the resume business, then you’re going to see even more spammy buzzwords injected into narratives just to get notice. (It’s a great way to “leverage” the system, by showing how you can “optimize” “dynamic” situations, and “shepherd” the “results” that lead to “actionable” “success.”) This will be a wash, because we’ll just replace one set of contradictory consultants with another set. The replacements, with experience in SEO, will at least have data on their side. Allegedly.

The larger issue for me is that we end up devaluing a skill there’s precious little of to begin with: writing.

Even companies where communication is the livelihood will tell you there aren’t enough good communicators. You can’t calculate the loss of productivity that occurs when people dress things up in formal-sounding language, for no good reason. Or the clear and concise reports that mysteriously balloon from a single page to five pages, just to make it look more important.

Sure, there are safeguards built into the hiring process. The unqualified and the intolerable don’t survive very well in the interview, but good candidates get shut out more often than you would think. I have another friend who is in a hiring capacity, and she has a constant struggle with HR and recruitment. When she has job openings, she tells her ideal candidates about it expecting them to make the cut, yet HR will forward a batch of screened resumes that don’t include no-brainer obvious candidates. She is able to use this information, over time, to calibrate what she asks for, but this becomes more energy wasted on cat-and-mouse games.

The paper resume is dead, and my observations to the contrary it’s not coming back for one simple reason:

When you apply online, they can force you to fill out the Salary Requirement field. Those left blank get kicked back to the applicant. You might have the perfect qualifications, education, experience and moxie – but if you’re a few dollars over the budgeted ceiling, you’ll never get the interview, no matter what you’re worth.