Is your Voicemail affecting your Job Prospects?

By Robert, Ticket Counselor 

Are you hurting your chances of employment without even knowing it?

Recruiters call many people every day and have to make quick judgments on the suitability of candidates. Every day at ERS we make outbound calls to our tickets holders and hear the variety of voice mail messages our ticket holders have set up.  Some of them make us laugh, but some of them give us pause for thought and make us wonder:

What would I think if I was phoning this person to set up an interview or offer them a job?

Now I am not a recruiter – so I decided to see what recruiters I know had to say on the subject, and our observations were correct.  I contacted a colleague who works for a local hospital, and was advised that the voice mail message that was played could make them quickly rethink their position on a candidate.

From our own experiences here in the ERS call center we came up with a list of examples of bad voicemails that we had heard while calling out to our clients:

•  “Comedy” Voice messages with Cartoon Voices.
•  Rapping / Signing - Keep it for the shower or the American Idol Audition tape. :)
•  Cursing - no one wants to hire you if you hit them with an F-Bomb!
•  Long, rambling messages. 
•  Preaching – your voice mail probably isn’t the best place to spread the good word.

Examples of good voice mails should be fairly common sense.

•  Keep it Short and to the point.
•  Keep it Clean.
•  Make sure it’s understandable – play it back to yourself.
•  Would you want to hear that message if you were calling someone to work for you?

My recruiter colleague also asked me to remind you all to think about your email address too:

That “hilarious” email you have for your friends to send you stuff is probably not the best one to use when you are sending in resumes.  There are plenty of free email services so you can always set up a 2^nd professional email address so recruiters aren’t put off before they even get a look at your resume.