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Many people, including numerous career experts, believe that when applying for a new job it is a good idea to customize your resume to better match the job’s description.
Those people, according to James Hudson, former head of talent acquisition at Nike and Levi Strauss, would be wrong.
“It’s bad advice to customize your resume” to match every job for which you apply, he recently told CNBC.
Hudson actually went as far as to call customizing your resume to match a job description “a waste of time.”
The longtime human resources (HR) executive explained that “job descriptions are typically owned and managed by the compensation team because they’re directly linked to pay bands within the organization.”
Which means that the person doing the actual hiring and whoever is writing the job description, especially in large companies, are likely two different people with two different ideas of what the company is looking for in a particular job applicant.
“The basic qualifications are always going to be exactly right,” Hudson said, referring to things like having a degree and certain experience requirements, “but there’s so much more in a job description than the basic qualifications.”
He says those specifics that the recruiter or hiring manager is actually looking for in a job candidate are best figured out in the interview or in speaking to someone at the company before applying for the job.
Any experience that happened more than 10 years ago, summarize it with the company, job title and date. Anything that happened in the last 10 years, “think about four-to-six bullet points per role,” he says. “And then of those four-to-six bullet points per role, think about a 50/50 split between responsibilities and result.”
Responsibilities are the daily activities you took on, like managing a team of five, for example. Results are examples of your positive impact. He recommends using the following formula to write them: “Accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z.”
Beyond that, “you just have to hope that the things that you’ve done and the skills that you have are what the employer is looking for,” says Hudson. No need to edit your resume every time.
“The most powerful thing your resume can be is encapsulating your authentic and unique career journey,” he said.