When you’re working with a recruitment firm to assist in your job search, one of the things you may come to appreciate is the feedback that you’ll get on how to improve your resume or CV. Coming from an experienced and reputable recruiter, this advice is almost always spot on…except when it isn’t. By this I mean that a recruiter’s job is to cast wide a net for you, while still maintaining a focus on finding the right job for you. A large part of this process is minimizing risk by focusing on work experience that is proven to be of interest to employers. However, once in a while this may come at the cost of excluding something from your CV that might be the key to making you stand out from your competitors who probably have very similar academic and employment credentials.
“Do you have an example?” you ask. Of course!
Many, many years ago, as a fresh grad out of a prestigious American college, I planned to do what many similarly situated grads do, spend a couple of years doing mindless work for long hours at a New York law firm. Despite the terrible hours and generally unchallenging nature of the work, the competition for these jobs is fierce as they are the best way for a grad with few discernable job skills to make a LOT of money to pay off college loans or help pay for graduate school, in my case law school.
Needless to say, I submitted my resume to a lot of staffing agencies. During the process, I was universally told by the well-meaning people at these agencies to remove some seemingly irrelevant work experience.
During my first year in college, I worked on what may be the best job I ever had, driving a seaweed harvester. While this was a fun job, most employment agents felt that it was not particularly relevant or recent enough to be of interest to employers. I, on the other hand, had seen how people reacted when I mentioned this job, usually with a mix of amazement that it existed and jealousy that I drove around in the sun on a lake all summer. I also knew that my grades were likely not nearly as impressive as most of my competition and that taking a calculated risk to set myself apart was probably necessary. So, over the objections of my recruiter, it stayed on my CV.
I soon got an offer of an interview with huge firm that is generally always in the conversation when debating the most powerful and respected law firms in the world. After going through the preliminary meetings and paper work, I met with two young associates. We engaged in a few minutes of small talk and general discussion about my school experience and why I wanted to work at their firm. Then, one of them noticed the aforementioned job. He had grown up in a town similar to mine and had seen the harvesters and had always wanted that job. For the rest of the “interview”, the three of us talked about nothing but that job and all of favorite high school, college jobs and dream jobs. Unsurprisingly, none of these involved working in the legal field. Nonetheless, my contact at the staffing agency called me the next, clearly surprised, and told me that I had been extended an offer to start the next week. Apparently I had managed to skip at least one more round of interviews thanks to my connection with my interviewers.
Was I lucky? Certainly. Does it help that I generally perform better than many of my peers in interviews? So I’m told. Was it wrong for the recruiter to try and steer me away from keeping the old job on my CV? Certainly not. Recruiters know the ins and outs of firm hiring processes better than you do. But no one, not your recruiter, not your friends and not your family, knows your particular circumstances and past experiences better than you do. So, you should take their guidance, since working with a recruiter is a partnership, but ultimately you have to remember that it’s your job search and resume and the final call is yours. If you have a particular skill or interest that is truly unique or which sheds some light on your character or personality, go ahead and highlight it. It just may be the thing that tips the scales in your favor.
For more career management tips and to learn how Hong Kong’s best recruitment company can help you in your job search, please visit Ambition Hong Kong.
Unlike our many of our counterparts in the U.S. and U.K., we are still getting more and more requests to search for candidates in the APAC region. Each week, we will continue to feature some of our latest, most attractive job opportunities. Below are some of the newest positions for which our clients are recruiting in Hong Kong:
