Acronyms: LTOHTWAUT

Love Them Or Hate Them, We All Use Them! They’re especially prevalent on resumes. Should you use them? Absolutely, yes! I recently read that, on average, recruiters read a resume for SIX SECONDS. Astounding, right? You spent hours deciding whether you facilitated or led that team project and the gatekeeper in HR is spending SIX SECONDS reading it. Before you condemn them, they’re busy, too! With the increasing practice of company career sites and internal recruiters, these people see hundreds of resumes from unqualified applicants every day. They no longer have 4 or 5 qualified candidates with stellar resume from which to choose. They’re looking for the proverbial “needle in a haystack.”

So, how do you become the needle? This is where acronyms are your friends. In the middle of text, any word with all caps stands out, RIGHT? You can draw the recruiter’s eyes to your qualifications by smartly describing your accomplishments in letters. Consider the following:

GMP, HACCP, SOP, SQF, SPC, ASQ, BRC. To a recruiter looking for a quality technologist, supervisor, or manager in the food industry, you just qualified yourself to be worthy of more than six seconds.

Good manufacturing practices, hazard analysis critical control points, standard operating procedures, safe quality foods, statistical process control, American society of quality, British retail consortium translates to BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. You lost your audience halfway through. Or, worse yet, if they bothered to slog through all the verbiage, they may be thinking, “doesn’t this person know the acronym?”

In today’s “instant” environment, we must all learn to write smarter to capture our audience’s attention. Hope I kept yours!