Do This To Get Your Resume Noticed By Hiring Managers

Hiring managers don’t have much time to review job applications, so you need to make it easy for them to see if you’re qualified or not. Here’s what to do—and not to do—to improve your chances of moving forward in the job interview process.

How to get your resume noticed by hiring managers and move forward in the job application process

The best thing you can do to get your job application and resume noticed by hiring managers is to make it easy for them to see your work experience, so put that as high up on your resume as you can. Skip the fluffy headlines, professional summaries, headshots and creative layouts.

Here are the do’s and don’ts from a hiring manager’s perspective:

Do these things on your resume to make it easy for a hiring manager to advance you as a job candidate:

✅ Put your work experience as high up on your resume as possible

✅ Sort your job experience in reverse-chronological order (most recent up top)

✅ Provide 2-3 specific bullets per job—ideally related to the job requirements

✅ When listing your job experience, put employer names first if they’re recognizable; otherwise lead with the job title. If you have a mix, go with the employer-first approach with each job

✅ OPTIONAL: include 1 headline at the top with # years of specific relevant experience

Here’s what not to do on your resume—these things make it harder for hiring managers to see if you’re qualified:

❌ Don’t include a photo or headshot

❌ Don’t include graphics or images at the top

❌ Don’t add a fluffy headline e.g. “Seasoned leader passionate about results” 🤢

❌ Don’t add a “Professional Summary” section at the top

❌ Don’t use a “creative” layout—boring and functional is better

Resume advice from a real hiring manager

Over the course of my career I’ve hired hundreds of people, interviewed thousands of candidates and reviewed tens of thousands of applications and resumes at companies like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Microsoft, and The Wall Street Journal.

The same thing was true at all of those companies: a lot of qualified candidates do things on their resumes that make it hard for hiring managers to figure out if they’re qualified or not.

Many qualified candidates make it hard for hiring managers to figure out if they’re qualified or not.

They fill their resumes with big walls of text in the “Professional Summary” section, they experiment with “creative” layouts that force the resume reviewer to hunt for the relevant experience, and take up valuable top-of-page real estate with ambiguous, fluffy headlines.

I get it—you want your resume to stand out because you know hiring managers get tons of applications for every open position.

And you may have even had a professional resume writer tell you to do that stuff.

But here’s the thing: those attempts to stand out make it harder for the hiring manager to consider you.

See, hiring managers are usually really busy. They have lots of daily responsibilities while they’re recruiting, like meeting with their teams, reviewing the status of projects, interacting with customers, managing budgets, and tackling administrative tasks. They need to do all of that while squeezing in time to review applications and interview candidates for the jobs they’re trying to fill.

That means they usually have limited windows of time each day to review dozens—maybe even hundreds or thousands—of resumes and applications for each position. And any resumes that they don’t get to review today just get added to tomorrow’s growing pile.

Hiring managers are often trying to review as many resumes as possible in the shortest amount of time

As a result, hiring managers are often trying to review as many resumes as possible in the shortest amount of time. In fact, they’re often using an “application tracking system”—a tool companies use to manage job applications—that have timers showing how quickly a hiring manager is reviewing resumes and shows them how many more they have remaining. These tools even congratulate them for getting through a certain number of applications in a certain amount of time.

For example, here’s a screenshot from Greenhouse, a popular Application Tracking System, telling a hiring manager how long it took to review all of the applications:

As you can see, it only took this hiring manager four minutes to get through four applications, so it would seem they spent just one minute per application, right?

Not exactly.

Notice there are 3 categories: Rejected, No Action Taken, and Advanced.

When reviewing each resume, hiring managers usually consider one of three actions:

1. Advance to the next step

2. Reject

3. No Action / Skip and Review later

If you really want the job, you obviously want your resume to fall into the Advance category.

Help the hiring manager decide to advance you in 5 seconds or less

Chances are, the hiring manager spent the least amount of time reviewing the resumes of the candidates they moved to the Advanced and Rejected categories, because it was so easy to see if those candidates were qualified or not.

And they probably spent the most time on those in the No Action Taken category, probably because it was really hard to figure out if they were qualified or not.

And that’s not a good thing.

Don’t get stuck in Resume Limbo

If a hiring manager is having a hard time figuring out if a candidate is qualified or feels like a resume is going to take a really long time to review, they’ll usually skip it and plan to come back to it later when they have more time—which is usually never.

And while you might think that the No Action Taken category is better than Rejected, that’s not necessarily true.

If you end up in the Reject category, you at least usually get some kind of rejection notice immediately, providing closure and space to focus efforts on other opportunities.

But if you fall into the Skip bucket, you often never know where you stand.

And when you’re sitting in the Skip bucket, the manager is seeing more and more applications each day, some that are making it really easy for the hiring manager to move them to the Advance bucket.

So, assuming you’re qualified, how do you increase your chances of getting to the Advance category and stay out of the Skip category?

Make it easy for the hiring manager to advance you as a job candidate

From my experience as a hiring manager, the candidates who most often move to the Advance stage are the ones that make it really easy for me to answer this question in 5 seconds or less:

Does this person have the experience I need for this job?

To get to that answer, I’m typically looking for:

1. Have they had jobs similar to the one I’m hiring for?

2. Have they had those jobs at companies that provided relevant experience?

To get to those answers, I’m going to jump right down to your experience.

I’m not going to read a “Professional Summary” and I’m not going to take much signal from a fluffy headline. Anyone can pretty much say anything they want in those sections, and in most cases, they all look and sound the same.

I’m immediately going to look at what jobs you’ve had and where you’ve had them.

And if it feels like it’s going to take me a long time to figure that out, I’m probably going to “Skip for now and review later.”

And we all know what that means.

When it comes to resumes, boring is better

Remember, your resume is basically an ad for you as an employee, and you need to make it as easy as possible for a busy hiring manager to understand what you have to offer—just like ads for products and services need to cut through the clutter and very quickly convince a busy and distracted consumer to buy something.

That doesn’t mean trying to make your resume look like a consumer ad. But it does mean thinking about your audience, the situation they’re in, and how you can make it easy for them to either advance you or reject you.

And more often than not, less is more.

So to expand on the list of do’s and don’ts from above:

✅ Put your work experience as high up on your resume as possible

As a hiring manager, I’m reviewing resumes in an application tracking system that has it’s own menu bar and other elements, which means I’m only seeing the top half or your resume at best. Make sure your experience—the stuff I want to see first—is up there at the top.

✅ List your job experience in reverse-chronological order (most recent up top)

Since most candidates do this and it makes it really easy to see if they’re qualified. If you do it the other way, and I need to scroll down the page to see what you’ve done most recently, that requires extra work—so I’ll put that in the Skip for Now bucket.

✅ Add 2-3 clear, specific bullets per job related to the job requirements

Avoid long lists of bullet points with ambiguous sentences. Try to keep your bullets tied closely to what’s listed in the job post. Here are some examples of great bullet points:

• Grew (metric) from X to Y (include specifics if you can)

• Built & managed team of 25 people including data entry and analysts

• Launched DEI initiative with 87% cross-company participation.

✅ List employers first if they’re recognizable, otherwise lead with job title

For example, if you were a Product Manager at Google, use this format:

• Google, Inc., Product Manager May 2013-October 2017

If you worked for a company that’s not quite as well know, use this format:

• Product Manager, XYZ Corp May 2013-October 2017

If you worked for both types of companies, use the company-first approach for all of your experience.

✅ OPTIONAL: One headline up top with # years of specific relevant experience.

If you’re going with a headline, try to make it sound similar to the very first bullet point in the Requirements section of the job posting.

For example, you could do something like:

• 5+ years customer support experience in enterprise software

Just remember, this takes up space and pushes your experience down, so only use it if you can tie it directly to the required experience. Use it carefully.

❌ DON’T include a photo or headshot

Not only does it take up space, but in most cases, hiring managers should not be making decisions based on someone’s physical appearance, and this puts them at risk of bias in their hiring.

❌ DON’T add graphics or other images at the top

Unless you’re interviewing for a graphic designer job, this only makes it distracting for the hiring manager and harder for them to get to your experience.

❌ DON’T add a fluffy or ambiguous headline

Please don’t include things like “Seasoned leader passionate about results.” It just takes up space and doesn’t really mean anything.

❌ DON’T add a “Professional Summary” section.

This takes up a lot of space—pushing your work experience further down on the page—and usually gets skipped over anyway. It’s also usually redundant with what you’ll be showcasing in your work experience.

❌ DON’T use a “creative” layout

Remember what we’ve been saying: you want to make it really easy for a hiring manager to find your work experience. Sidebars, columns and other formats means the hiring manager has to “learn” how to navigate your resume, which means they’ll likely put it in the “Skip for Now/Review Later” bucket. Theres a reason most websites have similar menu bars at the top and similar layouts in their footers—it’s because people expect things to be in certain places.

Don’t make the hiring manager have to hunt for your experience!

Conclusion

The most important thing you can do to get your job application and resume noticed and advance in the job interview process is to make it easy for the hiring manager to see if you’re qualified, and in almost every case your work experience is how they’ll decide that.

So here’s what to do—and not do—on your resume:

• Put your work experience as high up on your resume as you can

• Sort your work experience in reverse-chronological order (most recent experience first)

• Provide 2-3 specific bullets per job—ideally related to the job requirements

• Put employer names first if they’re recognizable; otherwise lead with the job titles you had

• OPTIONAL: 1 headline at the top with # years of specific relevant experience

Remember, your goal is to make it easy for the hiring manager to get to your work experience; if it’s hard for them to do that, it increases the chances that they’ll “Skip for now and review later,” which is not good!

• Don’t include a photo or headshot

• Don’t include graphics or images at the top

• Don’t add a fluffy headline like “Seasoned leader passionate about results”

• Don’t add a “Professional Summary” section at the top

• Don’t use a creative layout—boring and functional is better

I hope this was helpful!