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.
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The Job Analsis link is broken, but I’d love to see what’s supposed to be there 🙂
Excellent advice, Johanna. I’d like to add a caution to balance it.
Make sure your criteria is really your criteria. In other words, be careful about inflating your requirements just because you’ve got a lot of applicants.
Ask yourself questions such as these:
– Do I really need a Microsoft Word doc? Or would a text file work just fine? (P.S. if you give a text file a “.doc” extension, many people won’t even notice it’s not a Word file. Word will happily convert it.)
– Are the qualities, preferences, non-technical skills essential for this position? Or are some of them just indicators I like to see? (A friend was asked about blogging and public speaking in what was ostensibly a tech screening.)
– Does the position require that technical skill? Or do I think that might be useful sometime in the future? (I once interviewed for a Java position where they were doing Cobol work. They just hoped to do Java work in the future. The funny thing is, the job listing didn’t mention Cobol, and I didn’t have any Cobol experience.) Or would a skill with a similar technology and an aptitude for learning do just as well? (I’ve seen job postings that required experience with particular versions of particular tools or technologies.)
– Are you being too specific about “the way you do work.” Asking for experience with Agile or Iterative-Incremental lifecycles is one thing. Rejecting someone with XP experience because your organization does Scrum is another.
The problem with inflating your “requirements” goes beyond missing out on qualified candidates, it can result in a pool of less qualified candidates for the job, though they’re better qualified at covering all the bases on their resume. And if your “requirements” don’t really match the job, it may result in an unhappy hire that doesn’t stick around very long.
My point is that even when it’s a “hiring manager’s market,” the hiring manager still needs to give the same level of attention to the process.
Agree with George about inflated, or just wrong, job requirements.
btw, I’d love to hear your thoughts on phone screens — we’ve been going back-and-forth about whether we can/should do technical phone screens (i.e., additional screen over and above what the recruiter does).