The Effective Hiring Manager

7Screening Résumés

Now that we’ve thought carefully about our hiring standards and developed the interview questions that will serve as our hiring criteria, it’s time to start looking at candidates.

If you’ve skipped our guidance on creating your hiring criteria and behavioral interview questions, be careful: Without knowing what to look for, screening résumés is much harder.

Screening résumés is your first step in whittling down the interested and potentially competent candidates into a manageable group to interview. We know lots of managers who screen résumés when they’re doing other things, and consider it a chore.

This is a mistake. Hiring is important. Screening résumés is part of hiring. Doing something important while doing something else is galactically stupid.

Smart résumé screening saves you a lot of time later in your process. You’ll know more about what to look for overall, and also more about each candidate who makes it through the screening.

Here’s what to look for when you’re screening résumés.

Titles—What to Look For

First things first: Look at the titles of jobs the candidate has had over his or her career. We’re not looking for a successful career path at this point, but rather something much simpler: In our opinion, does this person appear to have done the kinds of jobs the right candidate—a true positive candidate—would have done to prepare for the role for which he or she is applying?

We say “appear” because there’s a reasonable amount of variation in ...