Manager Tips on Reading & Reviewing Resumes
- Scan the resume from top to bottom quickly to get a sense of the current skills and abilities, person’s overall progression and capabilities. Is the current position a match w the candidate’s experience and capabilities?
- Then Scan the resume from bottom up to top in order to get a sense of the overall look, organization, career progression, industry – technical – or functional consistency in the career and overall presentation.
- Is the resume impressive? We are going to look for:
- Can you find value statements (value that the individual brought to the organization) vs. showing up and doing what is expected and only what is expected?
- If they are doing what is expected is that enough? Or are you looking for the value one brought to the table? Like cost savings, ROI, efficiencies, collaboration, leadership.
- Keep in mind that if the value statements are not found in the resume then mark that for something to cover in a phone interview.
- Are bullets or job responsibilities consistent w the titles?
- Education and Advanced Degrees (are they related to the work experience, if not why)
- Job Titles and Career Progression
- Awards
- Certifications
- Grammar, spelling and punctuation accuracy
- Neat layout that is easy to read/follow: consistent formatting one font throughout, indentations (tabs not spaces), dates that are easy to follow
Concerns:
- Has the person copied and pasted the same bullets multiple times?
- Is there a lot of movement in the job positions?
- Is there any evidence of decreasing responsibility?
- Has the person moved around to different cities and states?
- If there are multiple positions are they related?
- Identify unknown companies that are no longer in business and ask why?
- Google those companies
- Look for acronyms of company names and if the acronym is similar to the person’s name then it is likely the person was self-employed at that time. This can be perfectly fine but ask questions around this – why, what clients they worked for, durations, etc.
- Take a pen and:Tie Durations together from the bottom of the resume to the top and calculate and document in the margins – (see sample resume review below). Look to find gaps simply to ask about those gaps.
- Circle Career Progression points in the person’s history