I'm currently with a company called Allied Motion Technologies, a publicly traded company here in Amherst, New York. I am the Global HR Director for all Allied Motion locations around the world. For the first time I try to organize the resumes and align them by the criteria of the position description of the position that we're looking for. So if we're looking for engineers, we're looking for years of experience, the specific degree or discipline that we might be looking for, and probably organizing them into key words specific to a technology in a lot of cases. So mechanical engineering you might be looking at experience with drives, motors, valves, those types of hardware, maybe even software. So those types of things I'm going to be evaluating resumes based on the content. And typically today we use a lot of technologies, applicant tracking tools, recruitment management systems. These are the alphabet super recruiting, ATS, RMS. We would utilize these tools to help rank these resumes for us. So I'm not necessarily looking for a pile of resumes. It's provided to me similar to the results in a Google search, where you're given them in a ranking order of what best matches the position description. So in most opportunities, when I look at resumes, it's in the order of the best match to the position description. One in particular I can remember, jumps off the top of my head, was one that really had the content and the keywords that we were looking for in a position, specifically lean manufacturing. It had listed the experience that the potential applicant had as far as the actual projects they worked on, gave a lot of detail about the project, the amount of savings they did, and the types of tools that they use to accomplish those tasks. It really provided to me the information that I needed to make a good decision to, hey I gotta pick up the phone and call this person right away. A lot of times I see a resumes that don't have enough content. They are really limiting what they describe about the role that they had at a previous job, regardless of whatever it was. For example, they may be listing that they worked in an office environment and only list the position description responsibilities that they had and never really get into any success or track record they'd actually accomplished. Employers, and me in particular, for example, I like to see the positive success or track record that somebody accomplished in their previous roles. And a lot of recruiters and employers, when looking at resumes, they're going to take the approach that past success is an indication of future success as well. So if you can demonstrate in a resume that you've done a lot of good things and you've had some successes, and had some track record of making some huge accomplishments, or not even huge accomplishments, just accomplishments in general, that will provide the reader with, I guess, a trigger to say let's talk a little bit more about what you actually accomplished. I'm looking at their transferable skills, and that could be multitasking, showing up on time, and that sounds silly but that is the things that we look for just to get people in the door. But the ability to learn new things, leadership responsibilities as they've taken on project management, even if they were the shift leader at a retail environment or a manufacturing role, or even in a club, those transferable skills show that the individual has potential. And in a lot of cases, that's what we're looking for in entry level, fresh out of college experiences. People who have demonstrated some potential for doing work-related activities that can be transferred into the environment that we might be looking to hire them for. The other day I was looking at the resume of a recent college senior, I guess he was, and his resume showed a lot of, I guess, not loyalty but a lot of stability in a particular role, even on campus. He had a lot of variety in what he did but all he really told me in the resume as I was reading it, is that he did minor tasks, and didn't say how much of those tasks, or how often he did it, or how successful he did it. And I knew the student, so I was able to read the resume, but I was able to talk to him about his resume. But if I was just looking at the resume without knowing this person, without getting an introduction, I wouldn't even have looked at it because it was too superficial. It really didn't give me enough context to say this individual has potential. So when talking through him, he kind of came back and rewrote the resume. And then all of a sudden he has much more of that multitasking capability. He has much more of the leadership of the shift activity that he was doing for the particular job. And it may have been a small, menial type of job, even here on campus, but it showed me a different side of this individual that really says well, maybe he's even now more worth talking to. Any person looking to write a resume, I always encouraged them to think of adding content to the resume in the format of star as I called it, situation, task, action, and result. So that gives you some ideas of context to put in to a resume that's going to show the reader that, number one, you've dealt with situations that might be applicable to the job that your applying for. What the tasks were associated with those situations. What the actions that you may have done associated with those situations and the results. So it takes a little bit of preparation and practice and development to get the sentences, because they do have to be somewhat brief. But you need to make sure that you can communicate in a bullet point sentence that shows the situation, task, action and result that shows the reader that you actually accomplish something or you have the potential to accomplish something. And then from there as you know the resume, you can speak to the resume and you can really verbalize the resume in an interview setting or in a conversational setting.
