Job Search Archives - Palladian Career Resources

Finding a New Career

In every recession, some companies and industries decline, never to come back. As painful as this process is, it is a natural component of our economy. Periodically, we clean house and get rid of companies who are not competitive. For the employees of these companies, the process is painful, frustrating and depressing. Making the situation even more difficult is the fact that the recovery will not bring back a lot of the jobs that were lost.

We have industries in decline and the recovery will not happen overnight. The US auto industry will be much smaller in the future. Cuts made at GM and Chrysler will lead to more foreign made cars and less domestic made cars. For people in the auto industry, this means jobs are going to be few and far between. Other industries are undergoing similar transformations.

The strength of our economy is the ability to bounce back and reinvent itself. Time and time again, we have had industries decline and collapse, only to be replaced by other industries. This has led to mass migrations of people to areas with better job prospects. One of the strongest images of the Great Depression is the small farmer packing up and moving from the mid-west to California. This pattern continually recurs. I grew up in Pittsburgh and watch hundreds of thousands of steel related jobs disappear in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. It’s part of the reason Steeler fans are everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of people have moved to other parts of the country.

We’re going to see the same type of transformation over the next several years. This could happen quickly, or it could take a while – in either case, it will happen. If you are a job seeker, letting go of a job, employer, industry and home can be extremely difficult. Many people struggle with imagining what their possibilities really are. They also are reluctant to start over completely in a new field.

If you are considering a career change, picking a new field or industry can be difficult. There are some tools that can help. One tool that can help narrow the search and uncover jobs you may not have heard off is O-Net. O-Net is a website that allows you to search skills and identify the jobs that match your capability.

O-Net provides detailed information on the jobs it recommends. This includes information about the skills, education and experience required. It also provides an assessment of the demand level for the positions to help you focus on careers with more demand than job seekers.

Breaking into a new field can be difficult. It’s humbling to go back to an “entry level” status after progressing successfully in an alternate career. In the long run, starting over can pay huge dividends. The new career can also provide a faster career path. An experienced professional starting over should move up faster than someone without experience, and in a growth industry, there will be more opportunities to progress upward.

Sharpening the Saw

I spent several days last week in a training class. Professional development is important if you want to improve in your career. In today’s economy, it is even more critical. Unemployment continues to increase and job seekers continue to become more frustrated with the job market.

There is a lot of talk about the recession being over. We’re now in recovery! Unfortunately, it’s being called a jobless recovery. Companies have downsized to a point where they are profitable at lower volumes. They are not in decline any longer. They are also not growing or adding staff – they are only replacing key losses. This could make the job market very difficult for an extended period. It won’t last forever. Job creation will return, but if you need a job now, that’s not much of a consolation.

In the training class I attended, there were people stable in their careers looking to add a new skill, there were individuals looking for work who wanted to give themselves an edge in the job markets and others were looking to move in a new career direction and needed to add new skills to make the career change.

These are great goals. Additionally, by taking the initiative to find and attend a workshop, these individuals demonstrated a commitment to their professionals above what most are doing. They are not sitting still. They are striving to move forward and grow.

This is an important lesson in an economic downtown. The number of discouraged job seekers has been climbing. There are a ton of people who are out of work and have given up searching for a job. An extended job search is frustrating and depressing. There’s no way around that. Being rejected over and over can make a person feel that their job search is pointless. Unfortunately, if you adopt this view, you will be right. Giving up will ensure an unsuccessful job search.

So what are you going to do? Asking this question is a critical first step. Running out and signing up for a training class is an answer, but it is far from the only one. What is critical is what you are doing during your job search. This could be enrolling in school, attending a workshop, volunteering at a local charity or any other activity that keeps you on a path of learning, growth and development.

In additional to gaining some new skills, you will also help your marketability. For people who have been out of work for an extended period, they are likely to face the question, “what have you been doing while out of work?” Many will only answer “I’ve been looking for a job,” while a few will describe substantive activities related to their career that could make them more marketable. If you were hiring, who would you pick?

Supply Chain Risk Reduction

As you write your resume and prepare to interview, you will want show how you contributed to your past employers. Focusing on ways you have cut costs is a good start. Reducing lead times and improving quality are also good to emphasize. These are only starting points for supply chain professionals. Managing risk can be the most important aspect of a supply chain role.

Supply chain professionals face numerous challenges. Sourcing provides some of the most complex obstacles a company will face. Sourcing professionals need to find ways to source high quality products, materials and services at low prices with short lead times and no supply interruptions. All of this must be done in a global economy constantly changing. As a supply chain professional, how you maximize the performance of the supply chain is important, but equally important is minimizing risk.

There are risks in every strategy and tactic a company adopts. Some risks are small. Supply chain risks are often huge. For example, construction firms who utilized Chinese drywall over the last decade face tremendous liabilities as the material has been found contain chemicals that make houses unlivable. Entire subdivisions are being abandoned. There are numerous examples of companies harmed by poor quality materials from suppliers. These risks are significant, but are only the tip of the iceberg.

When sourcing globally, companies face risks from every direction. Currency fluctuations can turn the lowest cost supplier into the highest cost option. Political disputes and striking workers can shut down companies and key transportation routes. Energy price changes can drive up or down transportation costs. Every year, natural disasters, from hurricanes to earthquakes, hit different parts of the world. The more widely spread your supply chain, the more likely you will be affected.

Managing all of these risks is challenging. Risk management was a key theme in one of the supply chain management sessions at the APICS Conference in Toronto I attended. The speaker talked about ways to build in alternatives and options into a supply chain. Developing secondary suppliers and alternate delivery strategies can be essential if your company wants to survive a major supply disruption.

As you write your resume, include examples of your contributions to managing supply chain risk. Often this will take the form of developing additional suppliers. Doubling your supplier base could be an expensive proposition, but it could also be much less costly than a major supply disruption. Your experience with balancing these priorities and the solutions you delivered can help set you apart from other supply chain professionals. Some people just show up. They do the minimal to get by. This usually involves shortcutting to the solution. Showing how you took a more difficult path but set the company up for success no matter what happens is much more valuable.

Risk management is a good topic for a resume, but it may be more suitable for interviewing. On a resume, you need to brief. You may only have a couple lines to devote to each accomplishment. Managing risk can be a complex process not easily condensed. For this reason, your best risk management accomplishment might not help on your resume. Once you get into an interview, though, you will have the opportunity explain what you did more fully and dive into complex accomplishments.

Information as a Strategic Asset

I had the opportunity to listen to a couple consultants from IBM at the APICS Conference in Toronto. They discussed ways to capture information and make it easier for decision makers to use. The overriding theme of the presentation was transforming a mass of data into an organized, easily accessible store of information. Meeting this challenge can offer job seekers a means of differentiating themselves from their competition.

The guys from IBM quoted two statistics that really stood out. First, they referenced a survey of CEOs where 60% said they need to get better at leveraging information. This is a challenge in every organization, regardless of company size, industry or market position. We live in a world with so much information; it can be difficult or impossible to get a handle on what is really going on.

The second stat related to ability of workers to find the information they need to make decisions. The stat was from a study of workers’ time and found 70% of time is spent searching for information. This means in a company, out of every three people, two of them are looking for information at any point in time. Only one in three is actually acting on the information they find.

These stats point out a major concern in organizations. Capturing data quickly and efficiently, and incorporate that data into decision making are critical capabilities to allow a company to change faster. Speed and flexibility were a major theme of a number of the presentations at the conference. Companies can’t afford to wait a long time to see trends develop and mature. They need to adapt quickly – faster than their competition.

As a job seeker, how is this relevant to your search? Simple, managing and leveraging data is a critical concern for companies, and if you can show how you improved the effectiveness of an employer in this area in the past, you can set yourself apart.

Some people will look at this and assume the change has to be major – implementing a major data management system affecting every aspect of the company. Major technology upgrades are important, but few of us are involved in buying a new ERP system. Despite this, there are a lot of other ways you probably affected information utilization.

Look at the ways you changed the information you required from your team. Did you make any changes to the reporting you required? How did this streamline the process for your team? How did this allow you to make faster and better decisions?

Look at the ways you changed the information you provided others in the organization. How did you improve the speed you were able to distribute information? How did you improve the quality of the information you provided? What did you do to make this information more accessible so others could make better and faster decisions?

These questions point to improvements you may have made in your organizations. Examples of these improvements can show the value you will provide if hired. They are accomplishments that can set you apart from your competition. To present these with the most impact, you should show the end result of the improvement. It’s not enough to just say you improve the efficiency of information gathering activities. How did gathering that data faster allow the organization to do something it couldn’t do before? This improvement could allow for better customer service, better forecasts, improved quality and reduced scrap, faster product development, or a host of other improvements.

Ultimately, you want to show how your efforts made a company more competitive and profitable. The incremental activities towards this goal can be impressive and help you land a job over other candidates with the same or greater experience. The key is showing your contributions and successes. Data management and reporting is critical competency affecting the overall success of a company. Providing examples of your success in this area will help demonstrate your potential.

APICS Conference

I’m back from the APICS Conference in Toronto. The event was extremely valuable. If you are not familiar with APICS, the organization provides operations management education, research and professional development. This was the first time I have attended an APICS Conference. I’ve been a member for a long time, but had never made it to conference. I now know what I was missing.

Two elements made the conference exceptional. First, the people at the conference are leaders in their fields. They are constantly reinventing manufacturing, operations and supply chain practices, and they are committed to improving not just their companies but their own potential. Second, APICS developed an educational curriculum offering tremendous value.

What stood out to me was the scope of the challenges people were tackling. For example, the theme of the conference was Global Ability. With this theme, people talked about how they were cutting costs and reducing their impact on the environment at the same time. The discussion was not how to balance these priorities. Balancing requires tradeoffs. The discussion focused on ways to achieve both simultaneously without having to hurt one area to help another.

The goals were impressive, but the results were what really stood out. I had the opportunity to hear from people who were succeeding in some of the most challenging situations. For example, one food manufacturer had committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reducing waste and improving profit margins. Several years into their effort, they had made substantial GHG cuts, and they reduced the total waste from a manufacturing plant to less than one dumpster a week. They also demonstrated specific savings from each of the activities they undertook. The result was a company doing significantly more volume, with less overall GHG emissions and waste, and a higher profit margin.

This is a great story and should inspire people to stretch to achieve beyond what appears possible today, but that’s not why I’m telling it. The people who developed the plan, solved the technical problems, led the teams to implement the changes, worked through the details and made this happen, and everyone else involved in the effort delivered substantial success. Do you think there are companies who would like to achieve similar results? Do you think there hiring managers who are tasked with delivering similar results and need help? Absolutely.

With the global theme of the conference, it became clear that the companies around the world face the same challenges. There are differences, but much more was the same. The demand for solutions and the people who can provide them is strong – even as the job market is weak.

To standout in the job market, you need to show how you are exceptional. There are plenty of people who will be average in a role. Hiring managers want people who will deliver results well above average. The key to this is showing what you have done.

Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to focus on operations positions and show how you can differentiate yourself and get hired. Some of the advice will related to resumes and some to interviewing, but most will help across the board in a job search. Although I am focusing on a specific set of careers, the advice holds for anyone. It doesn’t matter what your career field is. Demonstrating your potential through specific examples of your past success is proven technique and very effective in a job search.

So, check back every couple days for the operations management articles. To make it easier, you can sign up for the newsletter and receive all of them, sent twice a month.

Using LinkedIn in a Job Search

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool in a job search. You can use it to uncover opportunities. It can help you gain referrals into companies, and it can help you research jobs. Using LinkedIn in your job search is also easy.

On Monday, I wrote about building your LinkedIn network. This is an essential first step to using LinkedIn. Once you start building your network, you can start leveraging the contacts you develop.

The easiest way to use LinkedIn for your job search is to check out the job postings. A lot of companies post positions on LinkedIn. This doesn’t require network building. All you have to do is search the jobs. Although there is a benefit to job postings, this is just a starting point.

The real value LinkedIn offers is in gathering intelligence. Knowing the priorities and goals of a hiring manager can give you a significant edge in the hiring process. Failing to understand what a hiring manager wants can make it difficult to tailor your presentation, both with your resume and in interviews. LinkedIn offers a great way to gather insight into the hiring priorities of a company.

Researching Profiles

The first step in researching a position on LinkedIn is to read the profiles of people in similar positions. Ideally, you will be able to find the profile of the hiring manager, but this isn’t always possible. In large companies, there is a good chance you will find people doing the job you are pursuing. They may be in other locations, but their profiles can still give you insight you can use. Just remember many people don’t update their profiles routinely. The “current” descriptions can be a year or more old.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers offers a great way to pose a question to a large group of people. A lot of LinkedIn users actively participate by answering questions. If you ask a broad question, there’s a good chance you will get good info from a number of people. When asking a question, ask something that a lot of people in a company could answer and that would be valuable to more than just you. For example:
How would you describe the culture at Widget, Inc? I’m interested a job opportunity in (department or division) with Widget, Inc and would like to get an idea of what it is like working there.
How does the hiring process work at Widget, Inc? I’m pursing a <job title> position and want to understand what I should expect during the hiring process.

With large companies, you should get some answers that will be useful. For small companies, this tactic is unlikely to yield much. You can check how many people from a company are on LinkedIn by clicking on the company name in someone’s profile.

Asking For Help

Instead of broadcasting a question to everyone, you can ask a question of specific individuals within your network. With large companies, you can often find someone doing the job you want in a different location. Asking this person about their job and how they got their job can often yield great insight. Stick with questions the person can answer easily. For example, if you find a person hired in the last year, you can ask how the hiring process worked when they were hired and what they did that was effective in landing the position. Asking a question like “what is the manager at xyz location looking for” is not a question most people in other locations will be able to answer. You’re unlikely to get any response to this.

Getting Referred

As you interact with people through direct contacts and LinkedIn Answers, you will start building relationships with people. At some point, you may get to know someone who offers to refer you to the hiring manager for consideration. This can improve your chances of success dramatically. It’s not that the hiring manager will lower their standards – those won’t change. What will change will be the level of scrutiny you will receive early in the process. Many hiring managers receive an overwhelming number of resumes. Most only get a 15 to 30 second look before being rejected. You can improve your chances by getting the hiring manager to take a much closer look before making a decision.

Remember the rule of networking – it’s a two-way street. Individuals aren’t going to drop what they are doing to start working on your job search full time and a person isn’t going to recommend you for a position if they don’t think you will be successful. People will help you but it will be on their terms. You also need to try to help them. There will be times, in the short run, when networking is one sided – either you get a significant benefit without offering much or you provide a lot of help without getting anything in return. In the short run this is possible, but over the long term, both parties need to contribute. If one side is perceived as only interested in their self promotion, the relationship won’t work.

Branding With Your Email Address

The first thing a hiring manager will see when you send an email is your name. Few people think about how they are marketing themselves with their name, but there are pitfalls to avoid.

I’m not suggesting you change your identification to something other than your name. On the contrary, job seekers should identify themselves by name. Surprisingly, a number don’t. Typically, this is a result of using a family member’s email address. The other person’s email has their name in the address, and it identifies them at the top of the email. Sending an email with someone else’s email can be confusing for a hiring manager.

Many hiring managers receive dozens or hundreds of emails each day. You can’t expect a hiring manager to remember that emails from “Jane Doe” and the address janedoe @ gmail . com, are really messages from “John Doe.” Even worse, if you use an email without full names, remembering and identifying who you are can prove difficult.

For example, I received a resume of a job seeker recently who used a family email address. The email name was something like “John and Jane,” and the email address was johnandjane @ gmail . com. The job seeker had sent his resume a week or two ago, and sent me a follow up email. The follow up email was signed “John.”

Nowhere in the email was the candidate’s last name. The only way I could find the candidate in my database was to search on the email address field. This isn’t impossible, and it really isn’t all that difficult. It is more time consuming than looking up the candidate by last name. Most databases are set up to make looking up a name fast. There are so many fields to search on in a job seeker's record, looking up candidates on other criteria is slower. So, the candidate’s email ended up focusing my attention entirely on the fact that he doesn’t have his own email.

How to Change Your Email and Email Name

For your job search, you should have a personal email address with your name. This should have your last name and either your first name or first initial. It is easy to get a free email account. Just go to Google and sign up for gmail.

Once your email is set up, select the email name that is associated with the account. In gmail, you can go to Settings and then to Send Mail As and change the name displayed with your email address.

If you use Outlook, you can make this change in Outlook. Microsoft provides instructions at: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011507601033.aspx.

Finally, you should also set up a standard signature for your email. A signature is a block of text that is automatically placed at the bottom of each email you send. It should contain your full name and contact information – although just a phone number is usually sufficient. You want to make it easy for a hiring manager to pick up the phone.

Will This Really Help My Search?

Setting your email name, email address and creating a signature for your emails are minor details. They will not get you hired if you aren’t qualified. They also won’t cause you to be rejected by themselves. If you’re a superstar and clearly the best person for the job, you can make a lot of mistakes in your job search, and they won’t hurt. Most people are not clearly better than their competition. If this is your situation, you want to make the best impression you can every step of the way. Details like your email are easy to change. It only takes a minute or two, and then you’re good to go for the remainder of your job search.

The one way your email might have a large impact on your search is if you have something controversial as an email name. There are email addresses that are really hurting the job seekers. I’ve received emails that include made up boastful titles, such as xtreme, big and king. Others call into question whether the job seeker has a propensity for violence (just a hint here, but “gangsta,” “gunman” and “sniper” aren’t good to have in your email address). For other words (such as menace, freedom, hotrod and spartan), it’s more difficult to know how different people will interpret them. All of these words appeared actual email address of job seekers sending me a resume. The email addresses are eye catching and memorable, but they did not help the job seeker, and in a few cases, hurt their chances significantly.

Too Much Information

Should you volunteer information in an interview that will hurt your chances of getting hired?
When interviewing, it is important to be honest. Lies and fabrications will doom your chances when they are discovered. At the same time, there is information job seekers volunteer that is not essential. Often this information hurts the candidate’s chances. One example of this I have run into relates to spouses of individuals who relocate frequently. The spouse volunteers that they are likely to move again in a few years.

Should you volunteer information in an interview that will hurt your chances of getting hired?

When interviewing, it is important to be honest. Lies and fabrications will doom your chances when they are discovered. At the same time, there is information job seekers volunteer that is not essential. Often this information hurts the candidate’s chances. One example of this I have run into relates to spouses of individuals who relocate frequently. The spouse volunteers that they are likely to move again in a few years.

This is common in the military and in some corporations. There are individuals who relocate every three to five years. They know the odds are good a posting will not be permanent.

During the hiring process, a job seeker will often highlight the frequency of the relocations to explain why they are “jumpy.” Being jumpy is a term for people who do not stay in a job very long. It usually has a very negative connotation and many hiring managers will assume the job seeker was unsuccessful. This makes it important to explain why a person changed jobs. Frequent relocations due to a spouse’s career explain a jumpy track record.

Unfortunately, there is a question you are almost guaranteed to hear… How long will you be here before you relocate again? Most hiring managers want to hire people who will stay a long time. They don’t want to hire someone they know they will have to replace quickly. How you answer this question can affect your odds of getting hired significantly.

If you know you are going to relocate in the near future, you need to be honest. However, there are few people who know with certainty what is going to happen have two, three or five years down the road. You and your spouse may plan for your spouse to stay in the military for an additional ten years, and it is likely you will need to relocate a few times during that period. This isn’t a guarantee. There is a lot that can happen that can change this plan.

Your plans can change due to your decisions. Your spouse may decide to leave the military earlier than planned or you may not need to relocate when the next posting comes out. Your plans may also change due to factors outside your control. Just because your spouse wants to stay in the military, there is no guarantee this will be an option. The military grows and shrinks over time. There have been periods when it was very difficult to stay in the military because of downsizing. There is a wide range of other reasons that could also change your plans.

In the corporate world, predicting the future is even more difficult. No matter how stable a company is, there is no guarantee they will continue in their current form. Well respected companies fail and mergers can dramatically change the goals and procedures of a company. A person also has more control of their career in the private sector. Someone in the military usually cannot refuse a new assignment, but you can refuse a transfer within a company. There can be negative effects on a person’s career by doing this, but it possible to decline a move.

All of this creates uncertainty. No matter how you plan the future, it is very difficult to be certain what the future will hold several years down the road. For this reason, you should be careful when speculating about the future in the future.

When asked if you will relocate again, answer honestly: You do not have firm plans to move. You may relocate again, but you don’t know for sure. There are a lot of factors that could affect this. Right now, you are focused on building a career here.

Volunteering more information than this is unlikely to help you and it can create a false expectation with a hiring manager.

The one exception to this advice is if you know with certainty you are moving. If your spouse has accepted another position, and you know you will be moving in the near future, you really should be honest about this.

No Worries Man

I’ve got a friend working on a Caribbean island on a large construction project. The island is small and there are few jobs available. Residents are routinely walking on to the job site to ask for work. Their typical approach shows what NOT to do in a job search.

My friend is part of the project management team (he’s an engineer), but isn’t responsible for hiring construction workers. Despite this, a lot of potential workers approach him (mainly because he’s in the office a lot and works a ton of hours). Their approach is direct – they walk up and ask for a job.

The engineer then asks a few questions to learn about the job seeker. First on the list is “what are you good at?” In almost every case, the answer is “No worries man, I do everything.” This answer is useless. It gives no information about the job seeker and fails to give any reason why he should be hired.

The next question the engineer asks will relate to a specific functional area. For example, “do you have any experience with…” tile installation, drywall, carpentry, hvac repairs, electrical, plumbing, etc. Generally, he asks about a skill that is currently in demand on the job site. The answer is almost always the same, something like “No worries man, I’m the best tile installer on the island.” If the engineer asks about a second area, say “Do you have any electrical experience,” he gets the same answer “No worries man, I’m the best electrician on the island.”

Because everyone claims to be the “best on the island” for every skill, the answers are meaningless. They do nothing to differentiate the job seeker.

The next question the engineer asks is for examples of the work they have done, for example, “what types of tile installation projects have you worked on?” You should be able to guess the answer at this stage… “No worries man, I do it all.”

At this point, if the engineer is really busy or having a bad day, he will usually throw the guy out. If he’s feeling generous, he might ask a couple more questions, but they produce the same generic answers. No matter how many different questions he asks, he’s never been able to get someone to give a specific answer. They all are “the best on the island and can do it all.”

The core problem with generic answers is they don’t allow a hiring manager to consider the job seeker. In this engineer’s case, all he wants to know is who to send the potential employee to see. Is the best place the superintendent for flooring, plumbing, electrical, finish carpentry, etc? That superintendent will then make the hiring decision. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what a person is good at, you can’t classify them and consider them for a job.

I expect the workers are worried they will miss an opportunity if they take a stand. For example, if they say they are good with drywall, they will only have a chance if the company is hiring drywall people. If the company is hiring in other areas, but not drywall, the worker would be out of luck. Narrowing your scope to a single job type won’t limit the number of opportunities. On the contrary, it will do just the opposite and open up opportunities. There are no jobs for a pure generalist. Every job requires some level of specialization and certain skills. If you don’t focus on a niche, you will not be considered for anything.

This is the result for the workers on the island. They never get to speak with the superintendent who might hire them.

Describe Your Work Experience So a Child Can Understand It

One of the most common mistakes job seekers make is over complicating their background. Unless you are seeking the same job from a similar company, it unlikely the hiring manager will understand all the details of the job. This problem is magnified if the hiring manager is an individual outside your functional area.

It is common for a team of people to assess candidates. At least one will be in your functional area, but the others could be from completely different departments. They may understand the basics of the job being filled, but are unlikely to be experts in the career field you are pursuing.

Most people assessing your resume and interviewing you will not understand what you have done if you don’t explain it clearly. Surprisingly, some of the most confusing and difficult to comprehend resumes are also some of the longest resumes. The problem comes from the detail. Providing a ton of details, staying in the weeds so to speak, will make it difficult for a reader to understand your experience.

The solution is to keep it simple. Explain each role you have had in a sentence or two simple enough that a person with no familiarity with your career field could understand. How would you explain your job to a child in middle or high school? If you can explain your background very briefly in a way that is easy to understand, your resume will be much more effective.

Making your resume easy to digest for anyone requires you to explain very technical terms and to use few if any acronyms. Use terminology most people will understand and your resume will be easier to read.

Keeping your resume simple doesn’t mean you discard every technical detail. If you need to provide technical details of what you have done, explain them a little. If you provide a simple general explanation of what you did and then provide the technical details, most people will be able to understand the significance of what you wrote, even if they don’t understand every detail.

Bottom line: If you don’t write about it on your resume, it never happened, and if you write about it a complicated, confusing way that is difficult for most people to understand, it never happened. Make your resume accessible to as wide an audience as possible. If it can only be understood by the primary hiring manager, it is unlikely it will ever make it into that person’s hands. Resume screeners are likely to delete it before it ever gets to the person that can understand it.