Your resume is the traditional way job seekers create their personal brand. It’s the first impression that most job seekers make.
But there’s a downside to creating your personal brand through a resume.
Your resume is prescreened between 2-5 times before a hiring manager sees it.
What does that mean to you? It means most times you’ll never have the opportunity to make a first impression with the hiring manager, because even the best resume only gets through prescreening a small percentage of the time.
When you depend on your resume to make your first impression, it usually fails.
Let’s compare this to making your first impression face to face.
Here’s 6 reasons your face to face personal brand is more memorable:
Time Spent: You’ll have more time in front of a hiring manager face to face than they’ll spend on your resume. Since resume readers spend an average of 15 seconds on your resume and you’re likely to have many minutes face to face with a hiring manager, you should be able clearly see where you’ll have more time to make an impact.
Hiring Manager Attention: When you’re face to face, you have a much better chance to gain the hiring manager’s full attention. When scanning your resume, the hiring manager could be interrupted by a call, by email, someone stopping by to talk … literally anything could distract the hiring manager from giving full attention to your resume.
Memory: The hiring manager has a much better chance of remembering you after you’ve met face to face. Your chances of being remembered from your resume are much lower.
Sheer Numbers: The hiring manager sees hundreds of resumes … sometimes hundreds in a single day. That hiring manager will see far fewer candidates face to face, making your personal brand much more memorable when you make it face to face.
Personalization: When you’re face to face with a hiring manager you can directly ask about his/her needs and then respond, personalizing your communication to meet the hiring manager’s needs. A resume is only a one way communication, so you’ll have a tough time personalizing it without understanding the hiring manager’s needs.
And of course, Prescreening: You have much greater odds of being seen by a hiring manager going directly, rather than indirectly using a resume to gain attention. Your resume will first have to get past an automated prescreen through an applicant tracking system, through an HR rep or recruiter and up to 3 additional prescreening steps (for large employers) before you’ll get the chance to make a first impression with a hiring manger.
So what would you rather do?
Risk that your resume won’t get through prescreening and you’ll never have the chance to make a first impression?
Or extend your efforts to make your first impression with the hiring manager?
