3 Key Reasons Legal Recruiters Reject Resumes
By: Karen Anderson
In this article we’ll take a look at the 3 key reasons legal recruiters reject resumes, and what you can do to minimize the chances of this happening. Applying for your next legal position through local or nation legal recruiters can give your career the boost it needs and take you up the career ladder. However, many candidates can end up finding the whole process of sending resumes to legal recruiters very frustrating, and unsure why their application has not resulted in an interview.
Bypassing Automatic Rejection – Many online legal recruiting websites run some kind of automated ‘filter’ system on all resumes submitted. Bypassing this is an important step in ensuring your resume gets seen by a person who can then put your resume forward to the potential employer. These filtering systems generally scan submitted resumes for certain keywords that they feel ‘match’ the role in question. To give yourself the best chance of by-passing these systems, take a good look at the description of the role as advertised and identify keywords that may help your resume pass the test. Then ensure your resume has some of these keywords in the description of your previous roles or experience. Remember – simply adding appropriate keywords without having the relevant experience with catch up with you later on down the line, so ensure they are really relevant to your experience.
Be Honest but not overconfident – Many candidates will be tempted to ‘dress up’ their resume before sending it to a legal recruiter. Although it is important that your resume reads well, and reflects your experience and credentials, its easy to write it in a style that comes across as slightly narcissistic and hence over confident. Experienced legal recruiters will spot this easily as they view hundreds of resumes per week. So take the time to ensure it is well written, honest and portrays your strengths without coming across as a work of fiction.
Ensure your resume matches your online profiles – With almost instant access to candidates online social media profiles, it’s extremely easy for a legal recruiter to look you up online and see if it matches your resume. These days, LinkedIn profiles are the norm for professionals and also very public. It’s essential that your LinkedIn profile (or profiles from other professional networks) broadly match your resume both in terms of content, and style. So it’s always worth ensuring that your online profiles are up to date and consistent with any resume you might send out to a legal recruiter.
Written on: 09/29/16 PDF Version