The following was written by a tech manager in his blog Rands in Repose. He gets hundreds of resumes.

[tag]A Glimpse and a Hook[/tag]

The terrifying reality regarding your resume is that for all the many hours you put into fine-tuning, you’ve got 30 seconds to make an impression on me. Maybe less.

It’s unfair, it’s imprecise, and there’s a good chance that I make horrible mistakes, but there’s a lot more of you than me, and while hiring phenomenal teams is the most important thing I do, I’m balancing that task with the fact that I need to build product and manage the endless stream of people walking into my office.

But here’s a glimpse. I’m going to walk through the exact mental process I use when I look at a resume. I don’t know if this is right or efficient, but after fifteen years and staring at thousands of resumes, this is the process.

The First Pass

Your Name. It’s simple. Do I know you? Whether I do or not, I’m going to immediately Google you to see if I should. Oh, you a have a weblog. Excellent.

Company Names. Do I recognize any companies that you worked at? If I do, I don’t look at what you actually do, I assume that if I recognize the company, I’m in the ballpark. If I don’t know the company, I scan for keywords in the description to get a rough idea. Hmmmmm… networking words. Ok, you’re a networking guy.

Job Description and History. Here I’m looking for history and trajectory. How many jobs have you had and for how long? How long have you been in your current role? Where’d you come from? QA? Or have you always been an engineer? This is when I start looking for inconsistencies and warning flags.

~more by clicking the link

[tags] resume help, resume advice, improving your resume, get their attention, resume tips[/tags]