According to Business Insider recruiter spends 6 seconds reading a resume. This is understandable due to the volume of resumes a recruiter processes per day. Sometimes, it can be several hundreds of resumes in order to find a dozen ones that would match your Client’s requirements.
Get Clarity from your Client
Such speed in decision-making is achieved from CLARITY.
First, you should start with the information you have from your Client: job description, information about the project/company, etc. The best way to understand the peculiarities of the position is to get on a call with your Client so that there is no ambiguity.
You need to be clear on who you’re looking for in order to find them 🙂
For that make sure you ask your Client as many questions as possible. After you discussed the details with your Client find a couple of profiles of candidates and share them with your Client to make sure you’re on the same page.
Use a Checklist
Once you got this first, crucial step out of the way you should then create a checklist that will help you read resumes faster.
An example of such a checklist could be:
- Location: Washington D.C., locals only
- Work Authorization Status: U.S. Citizen or Green Card Holder
- Permanent Employee. No Contractors
- 5+ years of development experience
- 3+ years with JavaScript and/or related JS Framework
- Education: Bachelors in Computer Science or Related Field
- Gaps in employment
etc.
This list has to contain critical points that your Client is not willing to compromise on. It’s best to write them out and follow the process until it becomes automated in your mind.
Focus on Key Points
From that point, you’ll start developing speed because you’ll know on which part of the resume to focus your attention. Rather than reading the whole resume itself, you’ll be focusing on keywords FIRST. However, this is only a hard filter. The more relevant information you’re able to find the more time you should invest in reading the resume to understand whether the candidate is truly a match and if you can bring any value by approaching them.
Note: Not all candidates that seem to be a match on the resume are truly a match.
Sometimes a resume doesn’t provide much information so you have no choice but to call the candidate and find out. Yet, most of the time it’s possible to understand at which career stage your potential candidate is and predict what would be the next logical move that they would want to make.
For potential candidates who might be reading this post – Undercover Recruiter provides interesting statistics on why resumes get rejected. You might want to consider that when compiling your resume.
In case you missed our previous post check it out here. We talk about some insights that would help you create Your LinkedIn Messages Better.