Nobody Tells You Why | Crucial Hire

Crucial Hire / For HR leaders in the market

Nobody tells you why

Your resume goes in. Somebody opens it, reads it, and decides. Then the email arrives, or it does not, and either way you never learn what happened on the other side of that door.

Twenty years of reading resumes, and here is the part almost nobody hears: the decision usually has nothing to do with whether you can do the job.

Behind the door

What actually happens

Six seconds, and three questions

A recruiter or hiring leader opens your file with a stack behind it. They are not reading. They are answering three questions as fast as they can.

How big was their world? Population, sites, states, reporting line. If that is not visible in the first two lines, they start guessing, and the guess is always low.

What did they actually change? Duties get skipped. Numbers get read. A page without numbers reads as a job description someone copied.

Can they do it here? This one is decided by the first two. Nobody gets the benefit of the doubt on a stack of forty.

You could be the strongest person in the pile and still lose on all three, because the facts that would have won it never made it onto the page. That is the whole problem. It is not your career. It is what got written down about it.

What you are actually trying to fix

Three things

A summary that says who you areThree sentences carrying your title range, your scale, your map, and the executives who trusted you. Read in twenty seconds, remembered after.

Bullets that prove itLines with numbers in them. Not what you were assigned, what changed because you were there.

Confidence on interview dayYou wrote it from facts, so you can answer any follow up. No scrambling to remember what a bullet meant.

Those three are one job, done in one order. Get the facts down first. The writing is easy after that, and the interview is easier still, because you already said all of it out loud to yourself once.

The plan

Three worksheets, about an hour

Top of the page down

Each one takes your facts and builds the sentence for you as you type. Nothing to polish, nothing to install, and nothing saves on its own, so download your answers as you go.

Your resume is not selling you when you are not in the room

It gets opened on a Friday and talked about on a Monday, and you are not there for either one.

Ask yourself one question. After someone has had your resume all weekend, do you still have to explain what you actually do? If the answer is yes, the page is doing none of the work.

Here are the 5W's that sell when you are not in the room. Who, what, where, when, why, and how, written down once and working every time your name comes up.

See the 5W system

Your summary

Three sentences at the top of the resume. Scope first, capabilities second, boardroom third.

Build my summary

Your thesis lines

How every job opens. Title, company, city, dates, then one sentence that sets the scope of that role.

Build my thesis lines

Your proof points

Three results under each job. A power word, the HR work, what it covered, and the number.

Build my proof points

Not sure this is your problem

Three kinds of sentences show up on HR resumes, and only one of them gets a call. See which one yours sounds like.

Read the three kinds

What you have when you finish

One hour later

A three sentence summary you can paste at the top of the page today.
A header and a scope line for every job you have held.
Three numbered results under each of those jobs.
A downloaded file of raw facts you will never have to dig up again.
Answers ready for the questions an interviewer asks about all of it.

That last one is the part people are surprised by. The page becomes a whiteboard. Someone points at a line and asks how you did it, and you have a five minute answer, because it actually happened and you just spent an hour remembering the details.

When the facts are down

Have a recruiter read it

Line by line, with what a hiring leader would see and what to fix first, ranked. Twenty years of opening these files, pointed at yours.

Review my resume Hiring instead of looking? Talk about a search

HR Leadership Positioning