The Hiring Manager

In the most common case, when a hiring manager looks at your resume, it’s the only time that he’ll (or she, there are a few women in this business, at least three or four) even see your name, or anything else about you, for that matter.  That means that you’ve only got one shot at catching his (or her) attention.

The best thing to do when you’re writing your resume for a hiring manager is try to think like somebody who is reviewing resumes – somebody who is trying to identify a good candidate to administer a phone screen or to bring in for an interview.  I’ll give you some points to help you put yourself in this person’s shoes.

1. Either you’re terribly busy because your boss has unrealistic expectations, or you’d just like to get back to watching YouTube and you don’t want to be bothered by reviewing resumes.
2. You’re hoping to hire somebody to help alleviate the load caused by previously mentioned unrealistic expectations (or who you can order around and will do all of the work while you watch YouTube).
3. You’d like to get through this as quickly as possible so that you don’t get buried under mountains of work.
4. You’ve got dozens of resumes (maybe more), and almost all of them seem to represent candidates of about the same level of experience and skills.

What most of this adds up to is that the person reviewing resumes probably doesn’t have the time or the interest to read each one in detail.  The resumes probably either came from a recruiter, a database that scans resumes for buzzwords, or were dumped by somebody else.  Usually, the hiring manager reviewing these resumes is going to assume that they’re mostly good and mostly fitting and mostly reasonable, even though there may be some outliers (like getting a barista’s resume when you’re looking for a Java programmer).

What you also should consider, while we’re thinking like the hiring manager, is that more than likely, this guy was a geek at one point, too (maybe even still is).  He probably likes toys like the rest of us geeks (and since he has “manager” in his title, he’s probably got money to buy them, too).  It’s also equally probable that he speaks geek.  This means that you can more than likely safely assume that any geeked-out terms will be understood.

So, now that you know this person is terribly busy, but also can speak the local dialect of geek, you can tailor your resume a bit better.  You don’t have to worry about whether or not the hiring manager will understand what you mean when you write, “Wrote specification and designed web application running on Apache Tomcat to accept data requests, access a PostgreSQL database, and deliver data as XML,” because even if he hasn’t worked on that particular technology, chances are he’s at least heard of it.

To impress the hiring manager, you’re going to need to do a few things:

1. Get the point across very briefly.  When I am reviewing resumes, I give the same amount of time to a 5-page resume as I do to a 1-page resume.  If you want a hiring manger to really read it, make sure you are brief.
2. Mention the magnitude of your contributions.  “Developed in Visual Basic” doesn’t really tell a hiring manager what you did.  “Saved project by rapidly prototyping proof-of-concept user interface for configuring 3D object output” is much more descriptive and makes it sound like you’re worth hiring.
3. While it’s good to mention the magnitude, don’t be outrageous.  While it’s one thing to be honest about your accomplishments, just don’t go overboard.
4. Use proper grammar and spelling.  Not all hiring managers appreciate this, mind you; however, I’ve NEVER heard a hiring manager say, “I think this resume needs more spelling mistakes.”  Don’t rely on the grammar and spelling tools in your word processor – have somebody else review it so that you can be more confident there are no mistakes, or read it out loud.
5. Don’t go crazy with your formatting.  Formatting in your resume should only work to emphasize your content.  If you get too crazy with formatting, you risk being distracting or annoying – and with the amount of time a hiring manager, you can’t afford to distract from your content.

There is a chance that the hiring manager is the person looking for resumes.  In this case, beyond being merely descriptive and informative, you’ll have to be appealing in order to grab his attention as well.

If a hiring manager chooses your resume, it will likely be reviewed in more detail.  It’s good to make sure that while it’s brief, there’s enough there to hold his interest and adequately describe your background.

Sometimes the hiring manager is the only one to make the call on a phone screen or interview, but one other thing that the hiring manager might do is send the resume to his technical staff for further review and feedback.