Now that you’ve done your recruitment and posted your job ads, it’s time to start sorting through the applications you receive. Reports have said that due to the current job market, employers are flooded with resumes from potential applicants. Keeping this in mind, it is important to narrow your applicant pool to the top candidates, which will help make the time you spend contacting and interviewing candidates be more productive.
Here are a few tips from HR Anew President and CEO Deborah Stallings on what to look for when reviewing resumes and cover letters:
- Demonstrated achievement: Look for specific examples of goals that were accomplished during the candidate’s time with past employers.
- Contributions to the mission, effectiveness, and/or profitability of past employers.
- Patterns of stability and career direction. Stallings said that some candidates demonstrate a pattern of staying with past employers for six months, a year, or a year and a half. “The recruitment and hiring process is very expensive. If this pattern shows, it is likely it will be the same case with you. That is an important thing to pay attention to,” she said. Stallings suggested making a rule on a minimum amount of time an applicant should have worked with a past employer.
- Lengthy descriptions of education.
- Gaps in employment history- If an applicant has been unemployed for some time, look for what they have been doing in that time to keep their skills fresh, whether they have been volunteering, interning, etc.
- Too much personal information.
- Overabundance of qualifiers, such as “had exposure to” or “knowledge of.”
- Sloppy resume: Look out for typos and grammatical errors. This may indicate a lack of attention to detail, as well as reflect negatively on the candidate’s seriousness about the position.
An additional note on reviewing resumes is that a resume is not a legal document, Stallings said, allowing the applicant to write things that may not be true. An employment application that requires the applicant’s signature, however, is a legal document and binds the applicant to what they’ve written.
When reviewing an employment application, make sure the applicant has completed it in its entirety.
“Sometimes an applicant will write ‘see resume’ in sections of an application. You should have the expectation that applicants will complete each section of the application,” Stallings said. “This gives you the opportunity to compare what they’ve written on their resume and application and determine whether they have been honest with you about their qualifications.”
Stay tuned for the next entries in our hiring series about conducting background checks and drug screenings, as well as the how to interview someone and the legality of your interview questions.
