Why am I not getting job interviews when I have outstanding experience?

Dear Sam: I moved to Florida from New York last March and was let go from my previous employer because they wanted employees to come back to the office at least three times a week. I was officially laid off in October. However, I have been applying mostly for remote work since April, but I only had 4-5 interviews.

I hope you can make suggestions for my resume and cover letter. I’m great at interviews, I love people, I’ve had recruiters say how much they like me, and I have an excellent work history. – Lorraine

Dear Lorraine: Thank you for writing and attaching your resume and cover letter so that I can identify any issues that are preventing interview offers. Let me outline your resume to paint a visual for the readers. Your three-page resume opens with a “Summary of Qualifications” describing your experience as an executive assistant. Following this five-line paragraph is your “Experience” section, which includes 8 positions over the past 18 years. Each position is represented by 5 to 10, mostly single-line points. You’ve bolded your employers, job titles and dates, and included the location of each job. After the “Experience” tab, there is a “Skills” list that only includes technology applications. Finally, you list your “Education,” which consists of two colleges you attended but did not graduate from.

My main issue with your presentation is that you focused solely on summarizing your job descriptions. Reading each of the 59 bullet points on your resume, I don’t see a single accomplishment that predicts your ability to add value beyond your job description. Having said that, as a human screener (not an automated system looking only for keywords that lack the ability to “read between the lines”), I can see that based on the pedigree of your employers and the executives you’ve supported, it’s obvious that you are exceptional at your job. What you don’t do, however, is confirm why you’re so good at what you do and how you’ve had the opportunity to build a resume of this caliber. If you only touch on the expected functions of your role, any other qualified candidate will likely include similar information on their resume. The way you differentiate your application in a competitive job market is not only to provide a brief overview of the expectations of your position, but also to focus your content on how you have provided value.

Prioritizing your content is also vitally important. Best-practice presentations would require a brief overview of your position in a paragraph, followed by a few bullet points focused exclusively on your accomplishments. Also, I would expect more attention to detail in the formatting of your document given your work. Because some points expand to create widowed sentences while others are just a few words, your summary looks visually unbalanced and confusing for the reader to review. Also, if you look closely, and especially if you include invisible characters, there appears to be a lack of attention to detail in the construction of your document. This would not be good for an executive assistant trying to demonstrate expertise in document building and communication. For example, you have multiple spaces between some words in sentences, there is inconsistency in formatting, right-justified content is pushed into the right margin by a combination of manual spaces and tabs (instead of programming a right-justified tab marker), and there’s just general, like I said, general a mess in the document. If your resume was full of accomplishments, I wouldn’t be so concerned about how it looks. But with a combination of a lack of focus on how you’ve truly added value in each of your fantasy positions, combined with an overall disregard for aesthetics, I’m afraid your application may be overlooked and passed over by some less qualified candidates who may would pay more attention to these aspects of their performance.

Finally, I will mention that your cover letter is too short and does not match the caliber of your experience. Pairing a three-page resume with a one-paragraph cover letter is not the best representation of your experience as an office communicator. I would recommend paying as much attention to your cover letter for the 50% of hiring managers who are looking for this document to further their understanding of your career path.

I’m 100% certain that if you review your career, think about how you’ve added value to each of the executives and organizations you’ve supported, and follow today’s best practices for building an impactful resume, you’ll immediately see an increase in your interview offers. I wish you the best of luck in securing a remote position.

Samantha Nolan is an advanced personal branding strategist and career expert, founder and CEO of Nolan Branding. Have a resume, career, or job search question for Dear Sam? Contact Samantha at dearsam@nolanbranding.com. For information on Nolan Branding services visit www.nolanbranding.com or call 888-9-MY-BRAND or 614-570-3442.