The Resume as Glorified Business Card: Tips to Upstream Professionals on Landing an Interview

At SCA, we not only provide consulting and training services to the upstream oil and gas industry, we also assist in screening and recruiting direct hire candidates. Recruiter Mark Connor has put together some tips for prospective candidates on landing an interview with your employer of choice.  In this first installment of a two-part series, he describes the essence of an effective resume and the different audiences with whom you must be prepared to communicate. This article and more can be found in the latest GeoLOGIC Newsletter, now available for download here. 

SCA's Mark Connor

Drilling Engineers have a tendency to get straight to the point, and it was a Drilling Engineer who summarized the essence of a resume to me in four words – “A Glorified Business Card”. A business card is a few square inches of space in which a professional is required to sum themselves up as concisely as possible, so what information makes it on there? Your name, job title, company and contact details. Nothing else makes the cut. A resume is intended to relate the same core information, albeit in a little more detail - but where a business card is an effective tool to use when making a new business contact, what is the real purpose of a resume?

One vital misconception regarding the role of a resume is that a resume will get you a job. In reality, your goal when writing a resume should be to get an INTERVIEW. Your success in a job search will hinge on your interview and a well written resume will get you that interview. With that in mind, resumes should contain enough information to catch attention and get you in front of a decision maker.

A second misconception regarding the resume is that it WILL be evaluated by the hiring manager. In reality, the resume will more than likely be assessed by at least three other people before it reaches the decision maker, and those other people are unlikely to be from a technical background. Consider the following scenarios.

•        You are acquainted with the hiring manager and you send your resume directly to that person. In this case, the likelihood is that the manager will already be aware your abilities and the resume acts merely as a formality.

•         You deal with a specialized Recruiting/Consulting firm. These companies deal with Hiring Managers day in, day out and they have a deep understanding of the technical areas they deal with. A Professional Recruiter may not be from a technical background, but they are able to look past “key words” and understand the nuances of your technical abilities and how they relate to their client’s needs. A recommendation from a specialist Recruiter can be extremely effective in gaining an interview.

•          You deal with a generalist staffing company that has international clientele but no true specialization. These companies often have access to every vacancy that their client has open, so they work on many unrelated job openings every day. The key word search becomes a factor in resume selection and an understanding of technical suitability becomes limited.

•          You “apply online”. Regularly described as “black holes”, web portals do an excellent job of tracking applications but it is extremely difficult to influence the selection process.

So, considering the above scenarios, how should you approach resume preparation? It needs to appeal to different audiences. A resume should contain easily identifiable key words and a sufficiently simplistic breakdown of your job role to be understood by a Recruiter. However, it also needs to be detailed enough to inform a Hiring Manager that you are capable of performing the duties required. It requires a delicate balance but in order to be successful in a job search, your resume will need to convince more than just the Hiring Manager that you are the right person to call in for an interview.