It’s really critical for job seekers to understand the audience for their resume.
There are several potential audiences and levels of consideration for your resume. There is incoming – where you are pursuing a job/employer, and then there is outbound – where someone is searching for your skill set based on a specific job function/type of role.
Outbound:
This is usually someone in the recruiting/talent acquisition department of an organization. They are using keywords and industry standards to actually find professionals with a specific skill set. It may be a very specific role, or a broader category of skills. This is where LinkedIn and job board resume databases come into play and why you need a comprehensive “general” resume/profile that highlights your skills. Staffing agencies almost always fall into this category.
The areas that most recruiters concentrate on:
Titles
Experience (length of/type)
Location (country, city/metro area, and state/province/county etc. – even for remote roles)
Education
Functional (hard) skills – those “keywords”
Inbound (applications, referrals)
For the first stage, you basically have two stakeholders: recruiters/HR and the hiring manager. It is critical to remember that EVERYTHING ON YOUR RESUME is fair game for evaluation at this point.
The hiring manager determines the job description including requirements and “nice to haves”. They base it on the needs of the team and their actual budget.
The recruiter helps narrow down the candidate pipeline by filtering through applications and referrals. *IT IS PEOPLE, NOT AI/TECHNOLOGY reviewing your initial application.
Most recruiters take a first “pass” at applications to weed out those that obviously don’t meet meet the stated requirements. This includes the same criteria as the outbound search:
Titles
Experience (length of/type)
Location (country, city/metro area, and state/province/county etc. – even for remote roles)
Education
They generally short list the remaining resumes based on a more thorough evaluation and usually there are the equivalent of “Yes, Maybe, No” categories. Yeses and Maybes will be considered for scheduling evaluation screens; no’s will be declined. In the case of “maybe”, the resume may be send to the hiring manager for evaluation.
Some recruiters send all prospective yeses to the hiring manager, some will screen/qualify you first.
Once you get through the initial screen and onto the next step, you will most likely have some sort of a functional screen.
This is usually set up by either the recruiter or a scheduler of some sort. Past this point, unless you send another resume, they will use the document you applied with.
The screener may be the hiring manager or senior member of the hiring team.
After the functional screening process, you move on to interviews.
Every member of the interview team will get a copy of your resume; if there are other supporting documents (portfolio, exercises, etc.) the scheduler will include it in their meeting invitations as well as the job description
The final stage of the process (assuming you do well on all previous steps) is the offer approval process. Every employer has a different specific process. There may be only a few, or many approvers. This is the general overview of possible people.
The hiring manager’s leader/s. This could include directors and VP’s, possibly C-level depending on the role/org
The team HR Business Partner
Compensation team member
Finance
Talent Acquisition Operations (not recruiters, these are the team members that manage the processes and systems for TA/recruiting)
*If there is any discrepancy between your resume and the job description, this may be where an offer is not approved.
As you can see, there are a LOT of people that may use your resume as a data point in making decisions along the entire process from opening a job to making an offer.
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