Custom Resumes vs. A "General" Resume

When it comes to resumes, your resume is a tool: it's marketing material. It is not designed to get you a job; it’s function is to layout your skills, abilities and experience in order to get you an interview.

You will hear that you need to customize your resume in order to get it seen by the hiring manager. This is a very compelling statement especially if you have applied to many job postings and received zero responses. You think, "It must be the resume that has failed to get anyone’s attention; therefore if you customize your resume you’ll get more interviews."

But what are the facts? For any posting an average company may receive 200 applications and as many as 500. Crain’s Chicago once reported:

The new Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location opening Friday in suburban Evergreen Park received a record 25,000 applications for 325 positions, the highest for any one location in the retailer’s history, a company official says.

So if this is true, will a customized resume fair any better than a good general resume? The competition is staggering. What will really make the difference is having a person on the inside of the company get your resume flagged and separated from the 200. This is where networking comes in.

I suggest that a single strong "general" resume used in concert with networking or drilling into a company will serve you better than customizing your resume for every job posting. What if a company is using an electronic tool to cut down the number of resumes. In this case does a customized resume help when no human set of eyes are going to review the resume?The software's selection criteria is based on key words which should already be in your "general" resume. If not then you can update your resume to include missing key words or experience.

Utilize a well written "general" resume containing the accomplishments, experience and appropriate key words will save you the time of customizing your resume for each posting, time that would better be put to use networking. Plus, with a dozen or more customized resumes you have the added issue of keeping track of who you sent which resume to.

Network with people working at companies and businesses that are in the position to recognize your skills and abilities. Spend that time with people that can see the value you represent as a future employee. When you realize that only about 20% of jobs are advertized in news papers, the Internet and with recruiters, customizing your resume for every application is a lot of work, time and effort for such low probability of your resume being selected and reviewed.