Customize Your Cover Letter – But Not Your Resume (and Avoid the Buzzwords)
Are you spending hours customizing your resume to each job opening you apply for? Sounds time consuming. And Kerry Sandberg Scott agrees - she thinks it’s crazy to customize your resume to each job. Your experience is the same, so what do you need to change about it? Instead, use your cover letter to highlight how your experience applies to the specific position.
While we're at it, Kerry Sandberg Scott also dispelled another urban legend: the need for buzzwords in your resume in order for it to get seen. Here’s why she says that’s not true:
- Most companies don’t use applicant tracking systems.
- You can put the keywords into your cover letter so they would be picked up in a search.
- Nobody ONLY looks at keywords. Yes, recruiters may search for people with a certain certification, but they’re also going to look at the rest of the resumes.
- Whoever told you that may have just been trying to make money off 'coaching' you.
So bottom line... Recruiters do search for keywords when looking for candidates, but that’s still no reason to spend 2 hours preparing your resume for submission to a position. That’s just unnecessary. Spend the time on the cover letter instead - or applying to other positions.
Topics: Job Search Strategies, How to Write a Resume, Writing a Cover Letter
Subscribe to Blog Updates
More Hiring Topics
- Association Management (13)
- Candidates (4)
- Career Advice (90)
- CEO search (9)
- Employee Engagement (5)
- Employee Turnover (27)
- Employer Reputation (18)
- Evidence Based Interviewing (16)
- Executive Search (53)
- Executive Transition (4)
- For Profit Company Management (2)
- Hiring Managers (3)
- Hiring Process (99)
- How to Write a Resume (20)
- Human Resources (24)
- Innovation and Change (18)
- Interviewing Executives (65)
- Job Advertising (42)
- Job Interview Preparation (58)
- Job Market (12)
- Job Search Strategies (64)
- Negotiating Salary for New Hires (15)
- Negotiating Your Next Salary (15)
- Networking (25)
- Nonprofit Management (14)
- Organizational Culture (7)
- Performance Management (37)
- Personal Productivity (3)
- Preemployment Assessment (3)
- Reading Resumes (7)
- Recruiting Executives (17)
- Remote Work (10)
- Search Committee (11)
- Starting a Job Search (11)
- Top Performer (11)
- Video Interviews (7)
- Virtual Interviews (8)
- Webinar Recordings (4)
- Working with Recruiters as a Candidate (9)
- Writing a Cover Letter (2)
- Writing Job Descriptions (18)