A former Google recruiter—and Google receives about three million résumés a year—provides his personal insights into what will land a résumé in the “no” file.

• Formatting poorly: Long blocks of single-spaced narrative.

• Omitting key information: Leaving out a summary of six to eight qualifications in bulleted points.

• Sending a generalized résumé: Not tailoring each résumé toward a specific company; forgetting to emphasize transferable skills; omitting words or phrases specific to a given industry.

• Stating responsibilities without accomplishments: Excluding measurable results of accomplishments.

And the widely used statement that recruiters give résumés six seconds? The Google guy says it’s true.

–From Fast Company

New App Slack Lets Users Really Chat

Slack, a workplace messaging app used by the LA Times, NBC, Expedia, EBay, and even NASA, is changing the way colleagues communicate within an organization.

The app offers features such as the ability to use GIFs (animated images), customized emojis, colleagues’ faces, and even in-jokes. The real-time messaging system has garnered what some industry insiders consider to be a potential home run: Slack can be a replacement for e-mail because it allows users to share large files without the hassle of syncing across platforms or being rejected due to size.

Those who have adopted the app claim Slack’s appeal lies in its likeable quality. It allows users to be witty without being silly and has a human feel, they say. Perhaps that’s why Slack is being labeled “enjoyable enterprise software” without irony.

–From the Los Angeles Times

E-mail Response Wait Time

If you’ve ever waited impatiently for a response to an e-mail, new research from Yahoo and USC could shed some light about why.

According to the researchers, e-mail response times vary depending on the responder’s age, hour of day the message was sent, and the amount of e-mail in the responder’s inbox. Also involved in response time is whether the responder uses a smart phone or a desktop computer.

Surveying two million Yahoo e-mail users, the researchers found that 90 percent of replies came the same day the e-mail was received, and most of those were sent within two minutes after the message was received.

However, as the day progressed and inboxes became clogged, things changed. Younger senders still responded quickly but with much shorter messages. Senders over 51 took the longest time, 47 minutes. Women took an average of four minutes longer to respond than men. Finally, those responding with smart phones were the fastest although their responses were abridged.

The survey also found that in conversation threads, the messages came faster until one of the writers ended the discussion with a curt response.

–From The Wall Street Journal