Make Your Resume Do the Heavy Lifting For You

Do you use your resume to your advantage? Is it employed full-time? Is it out there every day, advertising your abilities and accomplishments to employers looking for talent?

Is it a sleeper agent, lying dormant until you spot a new opening? Something worth reviewing before sending it out? Perhaps the best name for it would be special occasion agent?

If that’s the case, it’s not good for your career. This is why.

Your CV as a talent agent

In this context, the word “talent” is an excellent choice. A fully employed resume functions similarly to a talent agent. It’s there when you’re sleeping, working, or playing. It’s advertising your skills and experience, getting attention, and being available for that big break, no matter what you’re doing.

Whether you realize it or not.

You are the product of your resume.

A resume with a career objective considers your requirements. Your ideal job title(s)? Check. Your ideal career level(s)? Check. Your ideal location(s)? Check. What is your ideal salary? Check. Do you want to work from home now? No worries. Check.

Today, there aren’t many job openings that don’t draw a large number of applicants. Because the internet makes it so simple to apply for jobs, recruiters and hiring managers rely on applicant tracking systems (ATS) technology to keep track of them all.

As a result, recruiters do what works best for them.

They register with job boards such as Ladders and conduct targeted searches for qualified candidates. They look for the best talent in the same way that you look for jobs. And they see companies, job titles, and job descriptions where you see…

Take a wild guess.

Recruiters examine resumes.

You target your searches and bring up job openings during a job search. 22,000+ verified, high-end recruiters use Ladders to target their searches for talent and bring up resumes. This is something they do on a daily basis. And Ladders members who have uploaded their resumes are part of that talent pool.

This leads us to Sir Roger Moore.

Sir Roger Moore and your CV

Sir Roger Moore’s charisma-fueled career spanned a massive 72 years, from humble beginnings to celebrated international highpoints across cinema and television; his work with UNICEF earning him a knighthood in 2003.

He was famously self-effacing about his acting talent and enormous international success, but he did once tell reporters who noticed his wife’s bandaged foot: “She was helping me count my money and she fell off the pile.”

So, how does this relate to your resume? So, when asked how he’d achieved success in his career, he gave a direct answer (for once), and it was this:

Every day, thousands of high-end recruiters conduct resume searches, while talented professionals like yourself keep their resumes hidden from the world, waiting for inspiration to strike and the perfect dream job to appear.

Those who understand this, of course, have a significant advantage.

He also said of his career, “It was 99.9 percent luck and a minuscule bit of talent.” Despite his modesty, the statement above demonstrates how hard he worked to create that luck.

His agent would have done the legwork on his behalf as his career progressed, but before he had a power agent, he did it himself. He knew that simply being present was half the battle.

And he was correct.

Dressing for the part on your resume

Your resume serves as your agent, as well as your advertisement. The point is, its purpose is to attract the attention of employers to your skills, qualifications, and talent. When you show up on the big day, it’s because you were invited. There has been an increase in interest.

So, how does your resume look? This is a crucial question.

Your career competitors are probably more concerned with dressing up their resumes for special occasions than with making their resumes work for them on a daily basis.

If you search for resume help online, you’ll find a plethora of websites displaying a wide range of resume designs, including multiple columns, highlight boxes, images, and colors. There is only one type of resume for this job and one type of resume for that job.

They look great, even if the words are mostly meaningless.

People like things that are visually appealing and appeal to their vanity, so they use them. They look around for the perfect killer outfit to dress up their expertise, just like a shopper wandering through a store looking at designer clothes.

These sites are also popular with Google. It believes that all of that content benefits the customer. Tons of colorful designs, explanatory text, links, and downloads. Wonderful! As a result, the sites rise in the rankings, and even more people are drawn in. Soon, half of the world will agree on the issue.

Aside from hiring managers and recruiters.

And ATS (applicant tracking system) machines.

The ATS machines get to eat those colorful, multi-format resumes like candy, but hiring managers and recruiters still have to sift through the hundreds that make it through.

Relevant information is scattered throughout; no two look alike. After much scanning, they are inevitably left with the usual dull descriptions of duties rather than short, easy-to-scan accounts of successes.

As a result, recruiters experiment with ATSs.

This entails awkwardly adding a plethora of criteria to the ATS in order to find only “perfect fit” candidates. According to a Harvard Business School report, this contributes to a “broken” hiring system in which millions of qualified job applicants are automatically rejected.

These qualified professionals are referred to as “hidden workers.”

The best way to avoid becoming a hidden worker is to dress your resume properly and make sure it is present on the day, every day.

A spinning bow tie would be eye-catching, but it would not get you the job.

This is how it is done.

Join our talent pool by uploading your resume to Ladders for free.

See how your resume appears when it is processed by an ATS for free.

Download a free ATS and recruiter-friendly editable resume template.

Leet Resumes experts will rewrite your resume for free.

Remember, uploading your resume is an action (however simple), and action is the only thing that produces results.

Sir Roger Moore became a legend as a result of his understanding of this. And then acted!