5 Ways a Resume Can Reveal a Strong Candidate

Hiring an employee is like selecting the right seed variety from seemingly similar ones for your garden: if you choose the wrong type of seed, your harvest will suffer. Gardeners spend a lot of time studying various dimensions of their local microclimates — sunlight, humidity, temperature, soil composition — to select just the right variety. 

What’s the analogous list for you, the hiring manager? How can you select from seemingly similar resumes? Here are some tips for resume critique:

1. A clear summary statement that contains a career vision

Generally, candidates who have a clear career vision are more likely to be a good fit as they select jobs with that vision in mind. Good candidates will embed that vision in their summary statement.

2. Multiplicity of job roles

You don’t want someone who bounces around from role to role or company to company too much. However, a person with experience in multiple, related, long-standing roles within an industry or sector has by definition varied and deep experience. Also note any improvements they made to the roles they inherited.

3. Concise writing

You lack the time to pore over densely written resume-prose. Luckily, to some extent the time crunch ends up helping you select a good candidate: anyone who can’t express themselves clearly and succinctly in such a high-stakes document probably won’t add much value. 

However, as with most aspects of hiring, the key is balance. A somewhat longer resume is not necessarily a bad thing: never blindly follow rules of thumb, like these. Remain flexible.

4. Know your must-have and weed out accordingly

When you create your job posting, include what the clear, must-have requirements are. Rely on your e-reader — or on your people — to weed out anyone who doesn’t make the cut. Yes, you risk losing a good candidate who is missing a key requirement on paper, but you’re far more likely to weed out skippable candidates

5. Scan for unique, telling details 

Beyond the must-have requirements, look for what sets a candidate apart. Past notable achievements, from awards to patents to publications, foretell future success. But key details may come up in personal data like volunteer work or even hobbies and interests.

Cleversow can help with every item in this list. Our Smart Profile shows you at a glance what any resume would — concise writing, job roles — while feeding into our AI engine so that your Smart Job Posting automatically weeds out the unlikely-to-fit candidates. We’re vastly superior to a free job posting site, that is. Moreover, Smart Profiles feature an introductory video which not only fleshes out career vision but also removes the need for an introductory interview, saving you precious time.

You can also batch-upload your mountain of resumes into our system to take advantage of our Rapid Resume Review (R3).