10 Best Practices for Screening Tech Resumes and Candidates

Too Many Tech Applicants?
While your company may be laying off or freezing headcount in most areas, you're probably still hiring technology workers. If so, check out this new Best Practice guide Dice asked me to write. And feel free to share it with your Hiring Managers.

• Learn 5 techniques for filtering out the unqualified resumes, and focusing your energy on the most qualified IT/technology applicants
• Learn 5 techniques that will improve your phone interview effectiveness, and lead to better on site interviews

More best practice guides at www.RecruitingToolbox.com

Joe Candidate: Problem Solver.

I just received an unsolicited resume from a guy for a job I don't have. Not sure about his target marketing skills (I'm not a hiring authority, but I am networked with a bunch of companies and recruiters), but I am sure that his approach in his email grabs me more than a standard "let me introduce myself" email. He focuses on the problems he can solve. I like the concept. Do you see candidates "drawing you in" more with their emails, resumes, cover letters?


Dear Mr. Vlastelica,

Are all your Divisions / Operations performing up to expectations?

• Do you have an operating unit that has a great product / service but needs experienced guidance?

• Do you have a new operation that needs someone who can roll up his sleeves and work without the corporate net?

• Do you have a “Problem Division” that needs someone to whip it into shape?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions I may be the answer to your problem.

[overview of background and resume followed]

Employment Branding

I'm going to risk preaching to the choir here...

I believe companies build their employment brands one candidate at a time.

It's borderline amusing to me when people start talking about employment branding, and they immediately go to their "ugly careers site" and their "lack of a good tagline" and don't discuss their recruiting and interviewing process. Come on!?!

Now, there's no question you should have a quality careers site, and - I suppose - some sort of tagline (although most of those are so silly and generic - they're all some sort of take-off on "Imagine the possibilities" or "Come join the winning team", aren't they?)

To really build a great employment brand, though, I think most companies would be better off investing their time and money in their candidate experience. I've been able to meet with many new hires and survey current candidates (both as an in-house corp recruiting leader and consultant), and I'll tell you what - there's usually quite a bit of room for improvement. And the things we can do to impact our candidate experience often have an (admittedly hard to measure) exceptionally high ROI on our employment brand.

I'll talk about how you might baseline your current candidate experience, identify opportunity areas, and some of the lower hanging fruit (relatively cheap and easy) things you can do to improve candidate experience in future posts.

In the meantime, tell us: Are you measuring your candidate experience today? Do you have any insights into the way your improvements to candidate experience have improved your employment brand? Please share. We'd love to hear what you're doing.