Blog Post: The importance of detailed experience in your résumé

On the other side, and more frequently, I see omissions in the résumés people send me to critique—huge gaps where they have not included the strengths they have most likely developed considering the kind of work they have done. Although I can pretty much “guess” what is missing, hiring managers are not going to take their time looking for it. Their job is to find appropriate candidates. If the information they are looking for is not there, they will put your résumé down and move on to the next.

Not fair?

It may feel that way. But it would be like going to the grocery store to buy canned kidney beans and finding the correct section. In this case, ninety-five percent of the cans are labeled, “Beans.” Not red beans or wax beans or pinto beans or green beans, just “Beans.” Are you going to pick up one of the cans labeled “Beans” and hope you got the right one? Does it make sense to take a can labeled, “Wax Beans,” and hope that when you get it home, the contents are really kidney beans? Or are you going to select one of the few cans more clearly labeled, “Kidney Beans?”

I think you’d pick the can where you thought you had a better chance of getting what you were looking for. Same way for the hiring manager looking at résumés. He/she is not going to “open the can” (give you the interview) if your résumé doesn’t look like it has the right contents for his/her “recipe.”

This is why it is so important to have the label and contents of your résumé match—why you need to include the right details about your experience. You want enough information there for the hiring manager to understand you are qualified for the job you are applying for.

If you don’t have it, you won’t get the interview.