Candidates Trying to Get Your Attention

IT HR

I have been reviewing quite a few resumes lately and one today had the Resume Title of "Network Engineer - Who can actually relate and talk to real people."  For those of you that have hired IT people you will know that there are some people in the IT world that have brilliant minds and great skill sets but don't have any customer service aptitude. To be honest, I thought this was a cleaver resume title - as it stuck out amongst the hundreds of other resumes I am reading through. 

Was just curious to see what other interesting things candidates are doing to get your attention since there are so many people applying for a position.

 

bsaxton

We recently received over 400 resumes for an administrative assistant position here at our IT firm. The candidates whose resumes made it to the 2nd round of the review process had some type of unique statement or well written aspect to their cover letter. In a job like this where there are hundreds of candidates who have the basic skills (MS office, answering phones, shipping, filing, etc) it was the cover letters that made the difference for me.

HRCG

For a Graphic Designer position, I have received full projects using our products, logo or story as part of their resume. It left the "just resume" folks in the dust.  It demonstrated that they thoroughly studied the company and were interested enoough to devote time creating something with no guarantees.  

TXHRGuy

[quote user="HRCG"] For a Graphic Designer position, I have received full projects using our products, logo or story as part of their resume. It left the "just resume" folks in the dust.  It demonstrated that they thoroughly studied the company and were interested enoough to devote time creating something with no guarantees.   [/quote]

This is a common logic but I wonder if it really pans out that way.  Sometimes, I think barriers to consideration are thrown up just because the number of applications is too high to consider them all.  Unfortunately, that means that the pool of considered applicants is determined by non-performance properties.  It's intuitively pleasing to suppose that each applicant who took the extra step of going from monster to your Company's website to fill out all the junk all over again must really, actually, be interested in working for that company, specifically.  However, it may also just mean that person has more time or, in the random universe of things they see and apply to, that happened to be one of them.  I don't have a solution to the problem of too many applicants, but I have been a long time critic of the logic often applied to cutting the number down to a reasonable, examinable level.

Hopefully, something like JobFox or ItzBig will be efficient and effective enough to solve this problem.