I think the presentation of a resume is much less important than the content. It’s interesting that sourcers and recruiters make most of the decisions about who

I think the presentation of a resume is much less important than the content. It’s interesting that sourcers and recruiters make most of the decisions about who gets to the interview stage (particularly in a down market), yet they are the least qualified to assess the capabilities of the candidate of everyone in the whole process. Despite that, their assessment of a candidate’s resume has an outsized influence on the candidate’s outcome. When you have 1,000 resumes from laid off software engineers from FANG companies that all look mostly the same, how do you decide who to call? I’ve been thinking lately that an interesting project might be to look for publicly available resumes of people who have recently accepted new jobs within the tech industry and compare their resumes against those of people who have been looking for a new job for a while. The comparison would be qualitative if only a few resumes are available or perhaps quantitative (i.e., a classification model) if many are available. Recruiters are not looking for the same signals as hiring managers, and since I’m not a recruiter, I would really like to know exactly what it is that they are looking for. As an example of this kind of discrepancy that caught me totally off-guard, I was slightly below the “years of experience” requirement on a particular job posting that seemed to match my background perfectly. The recruiter I was talking to had reached out about another job posting where I did meet the YoE requirement, but I said the other posting was a significantly better fit for my skills and experience. The recruiter replied that the YoE requirement was not negotiable, so I was put onto the interview loop for the much less applicable role because of this arbitrary and narrowly missed line in the sand (and of course I failed that interview, wasting both my time and theirs). A hiring manager would care less about years in seat and more about capability. That such a YoE requirement might be used as a hard filter when scanning resumes caught me by surprise—I had previously sent out plenty of resumes where I narrowly missed the YoE requirement, and in retrospect, my application was probably discarded immediately while using up the “quota” of how many times I could apply to that company. These sorts of insights from the recruiting world would be great to know in advance from the candidate’s perspective.