Unless You’re a Purple Squirrel, Update Your Online Resume!

“Purple squirrel” is recruiter-speak for a candidate whose qualifications are rare and for which a recruiter can charge a higher fee to the company due to the difficulty of the search. When sourcing candidates, recruiters will look first at resumes posted in the last 1 to 2 weeks and will generally not look at older resumes, unless they are searching for that elusive purple squirrel.

Looking at it from the recruiter’s perspective, you can understand why this is so. Recruiters are playing the odds, and they cannot afford to waste time contacting candidates who have already found a job or for some other reason are no longer in the job market. Time is money, and this is particularly so in the recruiting profession.

The take home on this? If you have posted your resume online, be sure to tweak or otherwise refresh it at least once a month, preferably every two weeks. Otherwise it will effectively become invisible to most recruiters, like those billboards you see on the highway that have become blocked by overgrown trees.

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