Start off with a basic introduction paragraph or two of what type(s) of positions you are looking for. Followed by a brief summary of the keywords related to the technologies you've used, or are experienced with. Follow this by either eductaion or work history next, whichever is more recent/relevant (if you're still in school, or haven't had a job out of school, education first)... Point out each role, accomplishment and related technology used.
In work history, give a brief paragraph for any major roles/projects again, with any related technologies used. Also include aliases and related technologies.
By doing this, you give up front what you're looking for... what you can use, and then back it up again. Have others who are great with your language proof read and give feedback on verbiage.
Half the battle is getting through the H.R. and recruiter types that hold the gates to the decision makers. The other half is following through with actual relatable experience that you understand, know or can easily learn what you need for the job in question.
Be honest to a fault in terms of what you know, what you don't and what you feel you can learn quickly.
That's my advice to anyone looking for a job in a technical field... You don't necessarily need to customize, but at least have a great resume, that will go a long way getting your foot in the door.
OTOH, my most recent three jobs--including my current one--were all basically through people that I knew.
It always pays dividends to invest in your human network. That applies equally well to college grads as to experienced workers.
Let's say you are unemployed, and living with your parents-- a very common situation for this generation. You're getting bled each month by your student loans, even if you no other bills, which you probably do. The candidate wants to work at any one of those 40 places, because otherwise they go into default and ruin their credit and probably their parents' credit too.
If you don't live at home, the stakes are losing your apartment or car. This isn't some unreasonable fear; bills need to get paid, and there's an entire generation that is struggling to do so because their largest bill just won't go away.
As opposed to what?! Any potential employer will ask you in an interview, "Why are you looking to leave your job so soon?". What are you going to say? "Oh, I'm just trying to find something better." - a surefire way to instill trust in your interviewer and get hired /sarcasm.
In any case, I'm not sure being unemployed is actually that much better.
This sounds like a whole lot of blaming the candidate. It also assumes that the candidate could even land one of those 40 positions in the first place. I applied to a whole lot more before I landed mine - as did most of my peers now in our early-mid 20s who didn't get swooped up in a career fair early on in the process.
You can't really tell me that someone applying for a job _in the first place_ truly wants to work (instead of pursuing a passion they like) period. More likely, the candidate doesn't want(keyword) to work at any of those 40 places at all. And here's the kicker:
The candidate should not be faulted for that if he or she is competent at the job and works hard.
The modern age has shown a lot of workers being faithful to their companies and having that faithfulness be an expected one-way street. Look at the firings of Disney and IBM Engineers. The Disney engineers had to even educate their replacements at reduced salary.
I'd love to be spending all my days producing music and building native iOS apps, but that's not how the world works. So, I work somewhere I tolerate working, somewhere I work well. And I count my blessings for it - not many millennials are as lucky as me.
Nobody jumps from the bottom of the mountain to the top - you climb it one step at a time. There are people making a living producing music and writing apps - the world does work that way. I'm not saying tomorrow you can decide that's how you'll make a living and it'll happen - but it is something you can work towards and achieve in a reasonable amount of time.
Why would you not want to do that instead of a job which you admittedly feel rather "blah" about?
But since you can't know a priori which company hires which way, the solution that people have settled on is to blast out a million resumes and hope that some make it past the keyword matchers and to actual human beings making hiring decisions. That's where the actual match-making takes place. But if you don't send out enough resumes to make it through the arbitrary, unpredictable filtering stage you don't make it to the matchmaking stage which means you're unemployed.
But what has happened is that the companies set up these online systems to ostensibly make their own lives easier. Candidates have responded to the environment that they live in and started resume spamming. Companies respond by using overly-precise keyword matching to filter out candidates, despite the unsuitability.
It's not as though job seekers started printing resumes by the thousands and sticking them to the door of every business in their town and the companies had to adapt to this by making online systems to reduce the crushing influx of paper.
Seriously though, I don't blame the internet or modern interconnected society anywhere. I say that companies should shoulder a larger portion of the blame for creating perverse incentives. Other than that, I'm just trying to describe the world as I see it.
Luddites would smash looms so that they could keep their old jobs; I'm merely suggesting that if companies don't want a million resumes for every open position there are things they could do -- which they are not currently doing -- to help with this.
The problem with email is that it's frictionless. It costs an immeasureably small amount of money to send an email so as long as there are some suckers out there who'll buy your penis pills, sending spam emails is profitable.
Similarly all the friction has been taken out of the "submitting a resume for a job" experience and companies are now getting deluged. That's probably not the optimal outcome for employers or job seekers, but the only people who have any power to change it are the employers. Job seekers don't have any real influence on the systems by which employers choose employees, at least not until they get hired and even then it's just about impossible.
The only knob job seekers have to turn is how many resumes they send out and there's little/no downside to sending out more so it's entirely unsurprising that they choose to do so.
Companies on the other hand have a bunch of knobs they can turn regarding how they accept resumes. They're choosing to turn none of them and dealing with the problem on the back-end (keyword matching) rather than the front-end (increasing friction). This leaves them with a quality problem because people aren't keywords and someone with a year too little of experience X might have more than enough actual skill with the thing you need. It's kind-of foolish to assume people all learn at the same rate, isn't it? But because of the quantity problem that employers have, they can't solve the quality problem because that would cost far, far too much. They'd have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on engineering time to try and find the close-but-not-exact-but-definitely-good-enough needles in the not-close-at-all resume haystack.
This is why various companies have tried all kinds of different recruiting tactics like Google's early days where you had to solve problems from billboards or how a lot of companies want to see your open source work or for you to take a coding quiz. That's solving the problem on the front end.
But for some reason not everyone has picked up on this and out of all the programming jobs in the world maybe only 10% (no idea, it's just a guess) get filled by people who solve the problem on the front end. Everyone else does it on the back end, and their methods for dealing with it that way are not up to the task. This is a well documented phenomena, there are countless articles on the subject.
http://www.cio.com/article/2398753/careers-staffing/5-inside...
http://www.today.com/money/how-employers-make-it-hard-find-g...
My own hypothesis is that most companies are so obsessed with a potential "false positive" hire that they're perfectly okay with not investing in a new graduate. Thus, we have to send out 10+ job applications per week, otherwise we end up as yet another one of the millions of unemployed, college-educated young adults.
It's not totally awful (I found a great job as a result of my career fair), but unless a company is specifically recruiting from your university it's pretty much a given that you won't be offered an interview, let alone a job.