Importance of Resumes While Shortlisting Candidates.
What is a resume? In simple words, it’s a medium through which a candidate advertise their skills, work experience and career achievement along with throwing some light on what interests them and who they are as a person. A candidate should be able to summarize their work history, outline their skills, education qualification and emphasize traits that would qualify them for the job they are applying for.
Resume-based screening:
The first step to recruitment is resume screening. Before you decide to invite a candidate for an interview, it’s important to first screen their resume and ensure they have the right qualifications, experience and skills required to perform the job. Resume screening is a time consuming and tedious process, however with technology this can be made easy and automated. This is only possible with a well-defined resume that contains all the relevant keywords along with all necessary details.
In depth information of the candidate:
As a recruiter, choosing a candidate based on his/her resume is a critical process. You have to ensure that the resume contains in-depth information about the applicant, such as qualification, project work completed by the candidate, their experience and so on. Failing to properly scrutinize a candidate’s resume can leave you interviewing one that is not suitable for the job. This will result in a waste of time and energy.
What to look for in a resume
An experienced recruiter should be skilled at reading, analyzing and quickly searching for pertinent information when reading resumes. If you want to be able to quickly screen through resumes and pick out the right candidates here are a few points you can watch out for while screening resumes.
Keywords:
The first thing you should look for on a resume as a recruiter is relevant keywords. Looking for keywords that match your job description will tell you almost instantly if the applicant’s profile is a match and worth reading through or not.
Concise content: Look for candidates who have the ability to demonstrate and briefly articulate their skills, qualification and expertise without using too many company-specific jargons or complex terminology. This will show you how abled a candidate is to freely express himself or herself.
Grammar, spelling: Spelling and grammar are important, and applicants should take the time to ensure they are using consistent verb tenses and have proofread their resume for spelling and grammatical errors. This will show you how organized and observant a candidate is and also show you how invested he is in whatever he does.
Experience match: Look for the experience that matches what you need, but be open to the different level of experience too. When screening through the resume, it is important to look at the experience a candidate has. This will help you understand his level of expertise. However, be careful not to hold this as the most crucial deciding factor. When candidates have more experience than required, it is alright to still consider them as they may be just what your team needs to grow. Likewise, a candidate with less experience will be easier to train and inculcate the job role and responsibility more easily.
Skills: While screening resumes, it is important to look at the new skills and technologies the candidate has learned. What will he or she bring to your company? Look for skills as it is more important than titles or the name of the college. You should look for interesting skills a candidate has in his resumes that might work to the advantage of your company like a project work the candidate has undertaken, or the field work he has completed.
Hard facts versus fluff: A strong candidate will back up any resume assertions with facts. For example, “took on and headed the ABC project and XYZ was the outcome,” “merited an internal award for excellence upon successfully completed ABC research.” Statements like these are facts. Statements about “teamwork, being a ‘people’ person, and ‘leadership skills,’ unless supported by facts are mostly fluff.
Results and achievements: Another important detail to look for in a resume is results and achievements. This will give you an idea of how spontaneous and driven a candidate is, while also throwing some light on his problem-solving ability and subject matter expertise.
Extracurricular activities: Not all focus should be on education and career; knowing if a candidate is active or has other interest in sports, music an so on is also important. This will give you an idea about an applicant’s overall character and personality traits and help you understand if he will be a good cultural fit for your company.
Co-curricular activities: As a recruiter you can also look for co-curricular activities. This will include the additional activities the candidate is involved in along with studies. Through this you will be able to understand a candidate’s ability to multitask.
In addition to this, you can also look for a few additional details that will help you understand an applicant’s suitability to a job role. Those are:
Career gaps
Educational gaps
Decrease in responsibilities
Cover letter
Resume readability
Resume presentation
With these points in mind, you will be able to quickly screen through and select relevant candidates to interview for your vacant job post. If you feel that you may need help with resume screening, visit Pod (formerly Calyxpod) today. We have the right software and services to help you source and select candidates to interview easily. To know more, visit https://pod.ai
