Resume Numbers Game

Resume Numbers Game Resume Numbers Game John Ord, a New York IT manager, stacked the resume deck in his favor every time he applied for a job opening.On the surface, it might look like John Ord got lucky.After a relatively short job search, he was offered an opportunity to be the cloud manager for an IT services company in New York with a prestigious list of clients. Now he’s at the forefront of a hot technology discipline and working with some of the world’s leading financial companies.“This is the trend to be in, in this business,” Ord said. “This is the right place at the right time.”What’s more, Ord never really applied for the cloud manager job. Instead, he succeeded on the strength of his wider networking efforts.Ord treated his job search like it was a full-time job. He woke at 6 a.m. Monday to Friday, went to the gym, showered, ate breakfast and hit the job boards at full speed at 8 a.m. Breaking only for lunch, he’d work his network, research the job market and talk to recruiters all day long. By 5 p.m., Ord would have applied to 20 to 30 jobs.“I spent the whole day looking for jobs,” Ord said. “By doing that, I got my resume to lots and lots of recruiters.”The manual effort was helpful, but the resume, he said, was his secret weapon.Without writing a new one from scratch, Ord tailored his resume to each job application by working from a “master resume” that detailed all his skills and experience. When he found targeted jobs that met his requirements, he cut extraneous information from this master document and submitted the relevant details. This system allowed him to send targeted resumes to multiple job postings quickly.“The more kinds of resumes you can get out there … the more opportunities will come your way,” he said. “And be aware of the broad range of skills that you offer. … You get out what you put in. It is a numbers game.”That’s why he was able to land this cloud job in June, Ord said. The recruiter who brought the opportunity to his atte ntion had Ord’s resume on file from a previous job application and thought he’d be a good candidate for the cloud manager position.“I didn’t apply specifically for this job,” he said. “Once I saw what the opportunity was, I was definitely interested.”The strategy paid off. It worked so well, in fact, that Ord is still being approached by recruiters months later.