Think Like a Hiring Manager When Building Your Resume

Let’s face it, most of the hiring guidance and advice is driven by recruiters. Typical agency recruiters have a base salary and are paid commissions when they successfully place candidates with companies they recruit for. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s common practice in most industries. Yet recruiters have a monetary drive to get you hired and their advice might not always come altruistically.

Our Founder, Angela Buccellato, was a recruiter prior to starting The Resume Rescue. She knows the industry well. That’s why she is always sharing honest feedback and guidance from her experience spent recruiting. This week, we are taking a look at the hiring process through the lens of a hiring manager and how they approach resumes.

Hiring managers are struggling to find candidates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.2 million Americans quit in October 2021. That turned analysts’ heads trying to figure out where the economy was going. November comes along and 4.5 million Americans quit . The rampant rate of people moving jobs is causing havoc for companies and hiring managers trying to hire qualified candidates.

Consider crafting your resume to catch the eye of the hiring manager and get to the top of the pile. While recruiters may be pulling resumes for hiring managers to review, you as the candidate still need to stand out and break through the pile of other resumes. You need to get to the interview round.

First, did you ACTUALLY read the job description or did you just skim it? Can you provide a quick assessment of what the HIRING MANAGER is actually looking for in a candidate? Too often we scan a job description and move directly to filling out the application and attaching our resume. ?Do you have multiple versions of your resume or just one? There is no clear answer to this because it depends on many factors like industry, roles, level of experience, etc. Jumping from one industry to another or doing a 180 when it comes to your current role may require you to have more than one version of your resume tailored to specific job descriptions.

Job descriptions offer you a lot of great content to extract and adapt your resume to catch the eye of the hiring manager. Even a quick scan and a trained eye will give you enough intel to know how to craft your resume or cover letter for that role. Typically, the first few bullets of the position requirements make up the bulk of the job requirements the hiring manager needs to cover. This is also a great place to source questions you may have about the role when you interview.

Next, grab your highlighter. You should be able to go through your resume and highlight your key successes. You need to have specific and clear metrics and avoid generic statements that do not tell the hiring manager much. What volume of loans did you close last year? Year over year, what level of growth, savings, or completed projects did you provide in your role? This is not earth-shattering news that you need stats in your resume. However, are you framing these stats in such a way that it is clear to the reader about what you accomplished?

Consider these two examples of the same resume:

·????????Successfully negotiated EOP inventory with the customer.

·????????Led successful negotiations with customers during unplanned program cancellation which saved ABC Company $3.4M of end of production (EOP) inventory and resulted in additional unplanned revenue for 2021.?

Do you see the difference between these two sentences? This is from the same resume. Our client could clearly speak and explain the second bullet verbally to us. However, we often assume the reader has the same level of understanding as us and overlooks industry or company-specific nomenclature.?

Finally, here is the hard and fast truth for hiring managers which should come as no surprise. Hiring managers are busy. Resume review and selection often get dropped to the bottom of the list when lumped in with day-to-day responsibilities and constant fires. On average, a hiring manager will spend a max of one to two minutes reviewing resumes and selecting candidates for interviews.?Often, there are already one or two internal candidates in the potential interview round. You need to make sure that you, especially if you are an outside candidate or a dark horse internal candidate, make it to the top of that resume pile. Make it easy for hiring managers to select you.

You can handle this on your own. Absolutely. However, it is often worth the time and money to invest in a resume service such as ours. We help clarify your thoughts, proofread, and simplify your content to make you stand out to hiring managers. Let’s connect and get you to that next role together.

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