Anonymous wrote:I'm a recruiter (corporate currently but executive recruiting for years in the past). I think I read about 100 resumes daily. I've been with management consulting (Accenture, Booz, Blackboard, etc) and I'm been with F100 co. like Citibank, recruiting for all levels in all industries including marketing/sales/graphic design roles.
Let me tell you people - no color.
That being said, you can put color if you just feel compelled to do it, but it doesn't matter cause I spend about 30 seconds on each resume. I am looking to see what you did/have done. I'm looking for how long you were in each of your jobs, the amount of years of experience, in some cases, education, every so often I will actually look at formatting/presentation of a resume IF and only if everything else is a match. I don't really care about how pretty a resume looks - it's more about getting insights into the kind of person I'm dealing with.
You can use color as long as it's not obnoxious but I don't really care. My hiring managers don't care either. I'm screening candidates for them so they will pretty much listen to my suggestions. I think people are waaaaay too into presentation and focusing on what they can do to break out of the pack - sorry but none of this works. The reality is that if you have the experience, it it's a good fit with a role, it will work out and you will get a call. There's only so much you can do if you are applying online and you have to be confident and professional enough to work within the parameters of the process. Substance matters.
I'm the IT supervisor from above. I agree with this. The format of your resume should be designed to make the information on the resume easier to find. It doesn't matter if it looks nice. It matters if the recruiting and HR screeners can find all the buzzwords they are required to look for. If so, they'll pass it on to the hiring managers. Then it has to be easy for the hiring managers to find the experience and information that they are looking for. If after all of that, the resumes are sorted into piles of A (closest matches and first choice for interviews), B (close, has all required, but missing some preferred experience), and C (has all required, but missing a significant amount of preferred experience). The harder it is to find your information, the more likely that one of the early previewers will just decide that it isn't worth hunting for what they want and will discard your resume or move on to the next one. Changes are if I move on, I won't be coming back until I've gone through the other resumes that are good fits for my job.