1. Every person is different and so is every job. You cannot reuse your resume created for one job to be applied to the next job. I know this is painful, but this helps you focus really on the job(s) that you care for. Sending a cookie cutter resume is a sure way to “delete”, “ignore”, or “next please!”

2. Based on the above hypothesis, the author is correct to best utilize the CV real estate well.

3. Basically a recruiter / resume screener / hiring manager is trying to answer a simple question, while going through the heap of resumes. “who are the top 5 candidates that I myself would talk to, in the interview round?”. Even if you any advanced mathematics or algorithms, there is no scientific way to arrive at this top 5. So the screener is basically making three lists in his mind. Must have candidates, may be candidates, and sure shot NO candidates. Its your responsibility of a resume writer to pas through these filters.

3. As mentioned above, the screener is now taking the responsibility of selling these top 5 candidates to the interview panel. Imagine the American Idol preliminary rounds, where judges find out top 100 or 50 finalists to be sold to the American population to vote in the final rounds. That is the real crux of the shows’ popularity. Back to resume case, the person need to find out what is the screener going to use criteria to make a “NO” list and try to stay away from it.

4. In my opinion, and back to my point #1, every resume need to be newly created for every job you apply. Here is how to do it…
A) Carefully read the Req.
B) Underline the key job requirements, key department within the company where the job is going to go, business unit of the large corporation where this job is required.
C) Review your own education, experience, recommendations that are most valuable to this job. The candidate may have worked on a java development, but its useless for an HTML development job.
D) Create a simple table, yes a table in the first page with three columns. Serial number, key job requirements, how do you map against these requirements.
E) Basically you are helping the screener simplify his or her job. So rather than reading a three page resume to find the answer to the key question, stated in a different way, “Hope this is not a wrong candidate!”.

5. Once you have this table in the first page of the resume, remove all the unrelated topics from the rest of the resume and keep only the relevant information.

This has worked very well for me.

Thanks,
Ajay