Resume Tips—A Pharmacy Recruiters Perspective

By Marc F. Cochran, CSP
Hire Dynamics

Believe it or not, there is growing competition in pharmacy hiring. With tighter budgets, and more scrutiny put on each potential hire health-care systems must identify top talent among their applicants. Many times your resume is your first opportunity to impress the hiring manager. Stop relying on the same boring resume you’ve used over the last 15 years. Here are some tips on how to make you stand out among the rest:

1. Make your resume “accomplishment-based”. Step away from just describing what you did and where. That’s a quick way to blend in with the masses. Begin by thinking what value did you add to your current or previous organization. How did you help the organization reduce medication errors, or potentially save money? Did you develop any new programs or projects that changed the way your department did things? The more specific the better. You might not immediately know the answers to these questions, but it never hurts to ask your peers, manager or director (discretely, of course). By making your resume more accomplishment driven, you control what the hiring manager sees first and help to start differentiate you at the start.

2. Make your resume interactive. With the rise of social media and web 2.0 there are a number of ways to make your resume more interactive. 99% of resumes are now reviewed on a computer before they are printed off. Include links to presentations, articles, or any other publications you have been a part of. If you have video, provide a link to that so they can see you in action. If you feel comfortable, provide a link to a Linked In profile, blog, or Twitter account if you have. Before you do this don’t forget to clean up your web-presence. Be aware that most recruiters and hiring managers will run a quick Google search on you prior to meeting you. Make sure that what they find portrays you as the professional that you are.

3. Include quotes from your references. Don’t wait for them to check your references at the end of the process, go ahead and use them to your advantage early on. Ask your top 5 references to go ahead and prepare a letter to include with your resume. Once you have them, pick out certain quotes (just 1-2 lines) and include under each job where they are applicable. If they can speak to your performance during any projects that added value, that’s even better. Using references, with your accomplishments, like this will help stoke the interest of the hiring manager.

4. Write a cover letter, but not in the traditional sense. Prepare a front page that has a short paragraph directed at the hiring manager, a quick summary of your accomplishments, and one quote from a reference. Just enough to make them interested to turn the page. Use bullet points for emphasis, not paragraphs. Our attention spans are not what they used to be. Again, this goes back to controlling the message of what the hiring manager sees and how they see it.

5. Convert the resume into an Adobe PDF. This allows the hiring manager to see the resume the way you want them to see it. Many HR departments and applicant tracking systems look for keywords to pull from resumes on Word documents. By using a PDF, it allows you at least a quick opportunity to have them view the document on your terms. Also, when they open the Word document it sometimes doesn’t look the way you prepared it to look. Download a free PDF converter from http://www.PrimoPDF.com and convert your resume into that format before you send it.

These are just a few tips among thousands to help with your resume. You must challenge yourself to begin to think of the resume more as a living “advertisement” of you, rather than just your history of work. Many of these tips, if used correctly, can get some “wow” out from hiring managers and help get an interview. Once you get to the interview, then it’s up to you! Good luck!