What's Your Exerience

Recently, I heard a colleague talking about the customer experience. He had nine customer experience imperatives that he thought every company should practice.  I couldn’t help but draw the comparison between the customer experience and the candidate experience. So many of these imperatives apply to HR, especially in our roles of attracting the best talent to our organizations. Let's take a look at some of these imperatives.

Personalized and tailored experiences. It's no longer a one-size-fits-all world in many respects.  There are a great deal of tools and differing technologies that help us source and attract candidates to our organization. Custom tailor experiences for your candidates as you would for your customers. It’s the platinum rule rather than the golden rule that’s important. We’re not all alike, so treat other people the way they want to be treated not the way you want to be treated. For example, communicate with candidates using the media that they prefer and use and not the media with which you’re most comfortable. This means varying communication methods as well as sourcing methods. Know where to find your ideal candidate.

Provide advice and learning opportunities. Be a curator of information. For example, through blogs and white papers on your website, or through LinkedIn, share information about what your organization or industry is doing. Use storytelling to share facts and antidotes. Give people something to talk about. Get candidates excited about your company so they’ll want to work for you.

Be a part of their journey. Remember the job search is not just one experience at a time but rather it's the path that the candidate takes from the time they start exploring new opportunities to when they come to work for you. Their journey is made up of a countless string of experiences that relate to you: how they first heard about you, what their first visit to your website was like, what they may have learned about you on social media, their first interaction with someone from your company, what the interview was like – from the time they parked their car to when they met their potential future boss.  These are all part of their experience. Make sure their journey is a positive one.

Engaged employees. Consider the individual a candidate will meet when they first set foot into your organization – their future colleagues. If you have an engaged and friendly workforce it’s going to show – no shine – through to the candidate. Consider the story I heard recently from a young man pursuing his teaching certificate. On a visit to a local school to complete an assignment for his studies, he was blown away by the people he met. Students and faculty walking down the hall greeting him in a friendly manner – “Hi, how’s it going? Can I help you? Hey, who are you – welcome to the school.” It’s certainly a place he’d like to work.

Neither HR nor talent management work in a silo in their organizations. All the departments and parts of the organization work together and can learn lessons from each other. A business model that is built around positive experiences is a win for everyone!

What’s a Resume for Anyway?

While I certainly understand that looking for a new job can be a challenge, I think most people should write their own resume and cover letter.

The average recruiter spends seven seconds on a resume, so you better be sure your resume is as good as it can be. However, that doesn’t mean that you need a professional resume writer to draft it—especially since you should be revising your resume for each position you are interested in.

A well written resume showcases your strengths and your achievements.  Before you respond to a job posting, you’ll have researched the position and the organization. You’ll know what they’re looking for and you will have used the keywords that will get your resume noticed.

This means you will be revising your resume for each position—not to in any way exaggerate your skill sets but to ensure you use their terminology so that your resume doesn’t get screened out by their applicant tracking system.  This is why having one resume doesn’t make any sense.

The purpose of a resume is to get you an interview.  You want the reader to know who you are; what you’re good at; what experiences you’ve had; what skills you possess; and what your educational background is. Since your resume should describe YOU, you’re the right person to draft it.

It certainly makes sense to have someone review your resume.  Select someone you trust but who doesn’t know you very well. Ask them to take a critical look at your resume and see if they get a sense of who you are from what you’ve written.  Remember the resume exists to get the interview.

Your resume should be easy to read with font size of at least 11. Use the space wisely but also don’t try to cram everything you’ve ever done on the page.  Try to use the white space wisely to make it easy to read.  Of course, no spelling or grammar mistakes are allowed!  Start with your current or most current position and work backwards. Give enough detail to spark the interest of the reader.  Aim for two pages but if you have to go longer, make sure the content is really useful.

I think the resume as we know it will disappear in the next five years. So many organizations now request you to fill out their online application and/or, let you import your LinkedIn profile into their system so focus more on your research into the organization and less on how your resume looks and you should do just fine!