10 Things to Look For in a Resume

As a hiring manager, whether you’ve made hundreds of hires or this is your first time, reading a resume is a vital skill. When hiring for an open position, you are often bombarded with tens or hundreds of resumes. On top of hiring, you have other important work responsibilities and you need to be able to quickly find the key components of a candidate’s resume to see if they are a good fit.  Here are 10 things to look for in a resume:

This is obvious but it can tell you a lot about a candidate. A well-polished resume with no spelling or grammatical errors shows that a candidate is detail oriented and really cares about their career. It shows that their writing and communication skills are up to par.

A good resume will contain the relevant keywords of the industry and type of position you are hiring for. There are some skills or software that are used/required industry-wide that would be important to look at. For example, if you want a marketing professional you should see keywords like “paid-search”, “CRM”, or “in-bound marketing”.

Look specifically at their list of references. A good resume will include professional references such as former bosses or other coworkers, giving you insight into how they performed and the relationships they developed in their previous jobs.

Look for things in the resume that you have a question about or that make you question the credentials of the candidate. Look for things like employment gaps, failure to provide references, lack of customization for your job posting, etc. Obviously, not all red flags turn out to mean that the candidate isn’t right for your company but keep a close on those things that raise red flags.

Many candidates will put their accomplishments in a resume, but they are very vague and don’t provide any measurable metrics to go along with their success. If they helped a company bring in more revenue in a year, it’s important that they have measurable numbers behind that claim. Not only does it show you their measurable success, it also will show that the data and measurable accomplishments are important to the candidate.

Seeing a candidate stay at job 2+ years is a good sign as you go through their resume. There are certain fields where job hopping is more common and more tolerated but generally it is good to see a candidate staying in jobs. This shows that the candidate has stayed long enough to learn new skills and build loyalty with an employer.

As you go through the resume and you that the positions of the candidate are decreasing in responsibility, this is a red flag. You want to see growth and ambition in the candidate you will hire and if the positions they have hold are decreasing in responsibility then this may not be the candidate for you. They may have reached a plateau in their career or they may be other circumstance that have caused this.

You have already established the responsibilities of the position you are hiring for so look for that necessary experience in the resume. At the same time, you should be open to the varying levels of that experience. If a candidate seems “too junior”, they may want to grow in their next role and are hungry for success. Look for the experience match but don’t get too bogged down by the candidate’s level of that experience.

On the same wave, look for outside industry experience that could bring a fresh new perspective or set of skills to your company. Look at where they have worked before and try to find how that outside experience could be of value to you. The skills they have learned can be transferable to adapt to the industry that you are in.

A resume should tell a story. A great candidate will be able to tell you a story through their experiences and accomplishments through their resume. You want a candidate that knows how to present themselves and tells you a story about their career up to this point and why their next move should be your company.