The Hiring Side

By Soozy G. Miller, CPRW, CDCC, CDP

I want you to understand what’s it’s like on the hiring side of the desk.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a recruiter.

Let’s say that you have several positions to fill at the moment. And let’s say that one of them is a Vice President of Lending.

There is a job posting online for this, and the hiring manager has been quite active on Linkedin, so there are several resumes in the applicant tracking system (ATS) ready to be reviewed. You’re lucky, because some ATS’s don’t have search engines, in which case you’d have to REVIEW. EVERY. RESUME.

In the ATS you search for “lending” and two entries come up. Cool, you think, I’ve narrowed it down already! But then you look at both of the resumes and they’re disappointing. One has the word “lending” in the Experience Section – so only one mention. The other has the word “lending” under Education – something about a training session. Then you discover that they were both submitted a while ago. So, they might not even be pertinent.

So you do another search, this time for Vice President. Maybe someone in the system at least has executive experience in the financial sector.

One resume comes up and it says Vice President somewhere near the top. That’s it – Vice President. So you want to dig a little deeper. You know that the position you’re filling requires Excel because it’s in the job posting and because you’ve spoken to the hiring manager, and she knows that everyone at the company uses Excel to track everything – projects and people. So now you do a search within that resume for “Excel” but the only place it turns up is in the Experience Section, in the second position down, which ended five years ago, and it says, “Used Excel.”

So you have a decision to make. Should you take the time to have a phone conversation with this candidate, knowing that it might waste up to 20 minutes of your time, or do you email the person, with the understanding that the person’s response may not be clear and therefore the email chain will grow very quickly? Or should you just mark the resume for the ever-growing “maybe” list?

Most resumes are badly written and therefore difficult to read. This means it’s difficult to determine if a candidate is actually someone who you should speak to. And, remember, there are hundreds of other candidates for this position and more coming every day. You will have to do this search over and over again until you have some decent candidates to consider.

This is why making each section of the resume impactful is so important. In fact, each section is important in its own way and is worthy of its own explanation. After reading the above, I’m sure you’ll agree that you want to make it easier for the recruiter to choose you.

In the meantime, please understand what happens on the hiring side of the desk. Recruiters are people, too!

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Better job. More pay. More control.

For a free resume review, please contact us at Control Your Career!