Wading Through Applicants
It’s now a hiring manager’s market. That means hiring managers can be picky and try to find just the right person for the open req. But, it also means that many applicants exist for each open req, and all of those people are applying for your job. How does a hiring manager find the right person?
First, realize there are any number of “right” people, and the first thing is to eliminate the wrong people. That means it’s even more important to do a job analysis. Once you have an analysis, you can see what’s essential for this job and what’s merely desirable.
Now, as you review resumes, you can say no to these people:
- People who don’t follow your rules for how you want to see the resume. If you want a doc file or a pdf or a text or in email, be specific about what you want. Anyone who doesn’t send you what you want is someone you don’t need to look at.
- Anyone who doesn’t fulfill all of your essential qualities, preferences, non-technical skills.
- Anyone who doesn’t have a minimum technical skill set that makes sense for your job
- Anyone who doesn’t have experience working the way you do. If you’re agile, you don’t have to look at someone whose projects for the last 10 years were serial lifecycle and were late.
Take a look at Tips for Reviewing Resumes for more ideas.
As I review resumes, I have three piles: yes, no, maybe. If you have a lot of resumes, many of them should now be in your “yes” and “maybe” piles. Now it’s time for phone screens. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.
P.S. the job analysis link link was broken and is now ficed. If you’d like to see all the templates, click here for the templates page.
4 comments April 21st, 2009