The Complete Resume Guide — Part 1

What do recruiters look for in resumes?

Googling or asking around will just leave you with conflicting advice. And that’s because it depends. It depends on your experience, the position you’re applying for, and the breeze coming through the window while a recruiter reviews your resume. Most advice is either too general, attempting to cover every position for every possible stage of every career, or too specific, highlighting resume fads and industry-specific details. Sure the advice may have rung true for someone in the past, but it may not work for you now.

But underlying all resume advice is the much more universal recruiting process. Recruiting departments and recruiters share similar processes and motivations for filling all positions from marketing to software. By examining these systems, we will create an approach to resumes and ultimately recruiting that works for any industry.

So, let’s begin by telling the untold story of the corporate recruiter. Say hello to Helen the recruiter:

I hope I’m not surprising you with this, but Helen is a regular person trying to do her job just like everyone else, not an advanced corporate machine with specialized training.

According to an analysis of LinkedIn profiles, Helen probably has a college degree in psychology or business and started her careers in sales. And if you think about it, Helen is just a salesman, sourcing customers, maintaining relationships, and negotiating deals. Below is an overview of her role in the grander recruiting process:

Throughout the entire process, Helen is the communication channel between the candidate and the company handling aspects like logistics and negotiation. But, her main responsibilities are in that blue part: sourcing and screening candidates (this is where your resume comes in). The rest of the process from interviewing candidates to final decisions is left to other managers or committees.

So in this process, her main goal is getting candidates that will pass this interview process and ultimately be valuable employees. Most HR departments measure pass rate and value by looking at two metrics: time to fill and quality of hire.

Time to fill is simply time from job opening to hiring. Since it’s easy to measure, bonuses or flat rewards are often given to recruiters for successfully filling roles fast. This incentivizes recruiters to find candidates that are most likely to both pass the interview and accept the offer.

Quality of hire is a much more complicated thing to measure but is basically the value an employee brings to the organization. Recruiting departments attempt to measure this through new hires’ performance reviews, turnover, and hiring manager satisfaction. But here’s a chart offering a more definitive view of employee’s value:

Notice the different factors at play.

• Your motivation for the role and company determine if you will even accept the offer
• Your skill set gained from experience and knowledge determine your starting position
• Your learning speed, potential, and motivation determine how fast and how high you climb individually
• Your personality and soft skills interplaying with your coworkers determine a more immeasurable team productivity
• Your motivation for the role and company determines how long you are producing.

OK OK, but what does this mean for my resume? Well, when recruiters filter resumes they are optimizing for finding candidates that will pass an interview, accept an offer, produce value, and stay for a while. There are three main categories of traits a recruiter can look for:

1. Hard skills that are role specific like technical skills, industry knowledge, industry experience, or general intelligence
2. Soft skills like communication, culture fit, conscientiousness, cooperation, leadership, ambition, or positivity
3. Motivation for the company and the role

But all they get are resumes, and boy do they get a lot of resumes — almost 75% of job applications are underqualified. This is where industry specifics and filtering fads come into play. Remember, recruiters aren’t experts in your fields; they are outsiders merely trying to notice correlations between excellent employees and resumes. In fact, the way recruiters judge candidate aptitude is actually quite similar to the way you do. Just like you, they also care about impressive accomplishments, name brand recognition, and pattern match against the best people they know.

Most large companies including almost all Fortune 500 companies attempt to streamline their resume screening with automatic screening processes to quickly eliminate half the applicants. Filters on years of experience, GPA, or prestige of education are easy ways for companies to whittle down their stack of applicants.

But, these applicant tracking systems (ATS) are far from perfect, and even 62% of employers who use the software note some qualified candidates are likely being filtered out. Even the most advanced systems basically take your resume, remove all formatting, attempt to categorize different parts of the text, and then match keywords and requirements from the job description.

Tech companies hiring scarce software engineers invest much more care and resources. Google and Facebook, for example, have massive recruiting departments that manually review every resume. Other tech companies like Coursera screen with a coding challenge and then manually review those that pass.

Beyond this initial screen, recruiters effectively and ruthlessly scan resumes searching for unique potential and skill. One study reports recruiters spend an average of 6 seconds before making their final decision. Others report an average of 2 minutes. Either way, recruiters are given a stack of resumes and spend their day filtering it down.

You could be an excellent, hard-working student, but those adjectives only mean something in comparison to other people. It’s why something like “I’m good at dancing” is really saying “I’m better at dancing than other people”. In the words of Syndrome from the Incredibles:

Your absolute ability or potential doesn’t really matter or even your comparison to Mr. Einstein Ph.D. child prodigy, what really matters is your comparison to the other candidates in the application pool and the criteria of judgment.

Now, with that introduction to how recruiters use resumes, we can finally get to what you should do for your resume. Check out Part 2