I am a third party recruiter who receives over 100 resumes per week. Most of those resumes are responding to postings I have place on several thousand job boards, or on my own web site. When I post a job opening, I carefully spell out the job requirements. Job seekers responding to my posting often have very few, or none, of the job skill and experience requirements in their resumes. When I respond to the candidate via e-mail, or call them, and inform them that they don’t fit the job requirements, the job seeker often responds by telling me that they have the requisite skills but they failed to include the information in the resume.
A Resume is not just a formality, it is the key to unlocking the company’s hiring door. If the information on the resume does not include the information the hiring company wants, no amount of cajoling by the recruiter will get the hiring company to interview the candidate. With the easy access to word processing software these days, there is no excuse for not tailoring a resume to fit the job description unless the job seeker does not have the requisite job skills and experience. If a job seeker does not have the experience and job skills the company wants, they should not be responding to the positing by a third party recruiter for that particular position anyway. If the job seeker is responding to the posting in order to get help from the third party recruiter with their job search, that should be clearly stated somewhere in the response.
I know many candidates believe that third party recruiters should “think outside the box” and present them to the hiring company anyway but that is not what companies are paying us to do. Companies provide lists of qualifications they want met and that is that. Companies are not looking for creativity when they hire a third party recruiter, they are looking to have their hiring needs met period.