Becoming Undeniable for Recruiters and Hiring Managers
You won't be seen until you learn how to see things from others' perspective
She opens her laptop and stares at her inbox with over a hundred unread emails. Among the memo chaos lies a message from the Talent Acquisition team demanding assistance reviewing job applications.
Being the Engineering Manager, Jannette acknowledges the urgency to backfill the Site Reliability Role on her team.
It is a critical role that requires someone with experience in orchestrating infrastructure at scale and managing high-throughput data in a hybrid cluster of CPUs and GPUs. Working experience with video processing systems is fundamental to be successful.
She must focus on finding candidates with significant knowledge and team fit overlap among thousands of applications and sourced candidates.
And there is where YOUR problem lies. You have less than thirty seconds to capture a hiring manager's attention suffering from a high cognitive load. The only way to achieve it is by eliminating all the clutter on your resume.
But before we dive into how you solve that problem, we must understand how recruiters and hiring managers find qualified candidates.
In the search for the best-fitting candidate
People in leadership positions often optimize for candidates requiring them to make the minimum effort possible to achieve success and create more capacity. In other words, someone with the skills, experience, and track record of successful projects.
Starting with the experience, they look into the hard skills required for the job and how long the candidates have been doing it. They also look into what context candidates have used those skills, matching it to their team or domain. Lastly, they verify candidates' level of responsibility.
Let’s dive into a concrete example
Our fictional character, Jannette, would search for candidates with Terraform, Kubernetes, Cloud Computing, and other infrastructure-related skills. She would also prefer candidates who had worked in teams that enabled video processing, encoding, and computing or in companies where they would have experienced it as part of the critical path. Lastly, since that was a backfill for the only video processing engineer in her team, she would prefer candidates with similar scope that have interacted with and served other technical organizations within their company, so they have the chops of stakeholder management. Since this is not a remote role, she would prefer candidates based in San Francisco.
Jannette would talk to recruiters to prioritize the bespoke candidate profile and adjust her search criteria. She would also use it to triage candidate applications.
What if there are no candidates that perfectly match the criteria?
Only if she cannot find candidates with all the qualifications, she would consider relaxing some of the requirements. Usually in the inverse order, starting by broadening the search regarding location, relaxing team context requirements, and then, some of the hard skills or required experience.
Each relaxed requirement will demand additional coaching and investment from the hiring manager. Thus, they will always prioritize someone that completely fits the job description above all.
Now that we understand how candidates are sourced and triaged, we will dive into why most people apply to hundreds of roles and can't get a single interview.
Let's tackle the main problem on profiles and resumes: Focus (or lack of thereof).
Creating focus means saying MORE with LESS
Acknowledging the cognitive overload and how they search for the best candidate, the only way to become visible to hiring managers is clearly show that you are the perfect fit for the role and only THAT role.
Everyone has a multitude of different skills learnt in the job. But despite your numerous achievements, you cannot stack up everything into your resume. Aim to deliver ONE single message.
Here is an excellent example of a resume focusing on solving one problem and conveying ONE message.
Software Engineer with 2+ years of professional experience designing, developing, and deploying scalable and secure cloud-based data applications and ETL pipelines with Java, Python, Spark, Airflow, and Cassandra. Proficient in Linux, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud, and OpenStack architectures. Hold a Master's degree in Computer Science focused on Distributed Systems.
By reading it, I know this is an entry-level candidate with solid experience that would be additive to data teams searching for candidates with hands-on development experience in data pipelines and infrastructure — a great fit for entry-level Data Engineer roles.
Here is another example that hiring managers often discard in less than thirty seconds.
I interact with clinicians, employees, and other organization leaders to understand perspectives and/or share findings. Among my responsibilities, I advise on multiple initiatives, such as workforce optimization and recommending solutions to complex employee relations and HR issues. I deployed and executed strategic HR programs by partnering with other HR functions. Also, as an engineer, I worked on projects related to generating Market Risk Reports for a banking client of TCS. My most significant contribution was developing a Risk Reporting and Financial Data Management system.
Both are excerpts from real examples — requests I got for referrals for Data Engineering roles. One has a great fit, and the other is the classic handyman example.
Instead of piling all your qualifications, focus on essential aspects of the roles you apply for and enrich it with context.
Why is context important?
Remember how Jannette prioritizes people? This is what will make you stand out among applicants. After all, many candidates will likely possess similar hard skills, but not necessarily in the context of the job.
I like how my friend Kaveri put it while we discussed how to use domain expertise as context for job applications.
If you got the skills, the experience (in the same context), and the right level of responsibility, you will be undeniably the best fit for the role.
Wrapping up with the following steps
Remember, hiring managers have a short attention span. Success means making it easy for them to find you while panning gold in an endless river of candidates.
Set aside time this week to review your resume and LinkedIn profile. After scanning, see where you can improve:
Reducing information: less is more.
Focus on one message for one job.
Highlight the context of your work.
Always answer the three questions: What skills? For what? In which capacity?
Make these changes and tell me in the comments how this helped you get more eyeballs.
Next week, we will explore how to increase your marketability by exploring roles that fit your skills and domain experience.
Thank you for reading, and I will see you on the next one!