Naturally you want to get noticed by hiring managers, recruiters, and the human resources department, but many job seekers aren’t above trying underhanded little tricks to make this happen. There are plenty of ways that you can make your resume or CV stand out to recruiters, but there are also a few questionable strategies that you should avoid at all costs.
- Don’t use a new opportunity as a bargaining chip with your old employer. Sometimes an applicant only wants to use a job offer as a means of bargaining with their existing employer for a pay raise. Do not attempt to leverage that great offer you just got for a pay bump with your current employer. Your employer may not take the bait and then you will be forced to take a job you didn’t want to begin with. If you do this enough time, your resume will show a string of short-term jobs that will flag you as a job hopper. Over time this will significantly affect your prospects as most employers will only hire workers with a solid job history.
- Don’t try to double your chances with a single company by using two separate recruiters to submit your resume to the same company. Allowing yourself to be submitted to the same company by two different recruiters does not double your chances of being hired. It also makes both recruiters look bad with the company, which makes you look bad with the recruiters.
- Do not include “invisible” key words in your resume in the hope of popping up more often in a recruiter’s resume database. Some candidates will include a slew of popular keywords in white font at the bottom of their resume. Although you may think you’re being clever by doing this, you will be found out. Most database software programs can easily discover these white font keywords and reveal them to the recruiter against a black background. Also, if the recruiter doesn’t see the searched for keywords in the body of your resume s/he will know that something is up and your resume will get dumped anyway.
