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A top recruiter on what anyone can see after 30 seconds with your resume

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Hello. (Inspirestock/Corbis)

This question originally appeared on Quora: What do recruiters look for in a resume at first glance? Answer by Ambra Benjamin, Engineering Recruiter.

 I don’t look through stacks of resumes anymore. I hate paper. I do everything online.
 There has been for many decades, a mysterious Wizard of Oz-type viewpoint of the recruiting world that I think is somewhat misappropriated. People seem to be truly fascinated by what goes on behind the curtain, when in reality, recruiters aren’t running the covert operation many think. “Does this candidate seem like they stand a chance of being a good match for this role? If yes, proceed to next step. If no, reject.”
 I’ll highlight how I personally absorb a resume. I should preface this by saying that currently I primarily recruit for senior-level software engineers. In my past life I recruited for PMs, MBAs, finance, sales, and pretty much all of it. Everything I’m about to say broadly applies to all of these fields. I also was a campus recruiter, and you read resumes of new grads a bit differently since experience is less meaty. So for non-new grads, here’s how it goes in my brain:
  • Most recent role. I’m generally trying to figure out what this person’s current status is, and why/if they might even be interested in a new role. Have they only been in their last position for three months? If so, probably not the best time for me to reach out, right? Unless they work for Zynga, or somewhere tragic like that (said with great respect for Farmville, the app that put Facebook apps on the map). If it’s an incoming resume, I’m wondering why the candidate is looking now. Are they laid off? Did they get fired? Have they only been in their role for a few months and they’re possibly hating it? But most importantly, is their most recent experience relevant to the position for which I’m hiring?
  • Company recognition. Not even gonna lie. I am a company snob. Now don’t get all Judgy McJudgerson about my judgy-ness. Hear me out. It’s not even that I think certain companies are better than others (although some most certainly are). It’s purely a matter of how quickly can I assign a frame of reference. This is also known as “credibility.” Oh you worked at Amazon? Then you’re probably accustomed to working on projects at scale. You’re at a well known crash-and-burn start-up? You have probably worn many hats and have been running at a sprinter’s pace. There are some pretty blatant if/then associations I can make simply by recognizing a company name. Because recruiters have generally been doing this job for awhile, we notice patterns and trends among candidates from certain companies and we formulate assumptions as a result. There are edge cases and our assumptions can fail us, but again, this is a resume review; we’re talking a less than 20-second analysis. Assigning frame of reference is often more difficult to do when a candidate has only worked for obscure companies I’ve never heard of. When I can’t assign company recognition, it just means I have to read the resume a little deeper, which usually isn’t an issue, unless it’s poorly formatted, poorly written, uninformative, and wrought with spelling errors—in which case, you might have lost my interest.

Read more….http://qz.com/525496/done-what-a-recruiter-sees-on-your-resume-at-first-glance/

10 Things Mentally Tough People Do (Advice From a Former Navy SEAL)

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Improve your resiliency–or teach your kids to be mentally tougher–with these important practices.

IMAGE: Getty Images

Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”

There’s no surprise that it’s a characteristic of some of the world’s most successful people. It’s also a required trait to endure and succeed in some of the toughest specialties in the U.S. military.

Over on Task and Purpose (a site for members of the U.S. military) and Fatherly (a site for–well, fathers), a former U.S. Navy SEAL named Eric Greitens (now a candidate for Missouri governor, by the way) shared his tips for raising children to be more resilient–rules that also apply to anyone who wants to increase their mental toughness.

(Got ideas for a future column? Contact me and let me know. You might also check out my colleague Chris Matyszczyk’s column about Navy SEALs, leadership, and getting up in the morning.)

Here’s our take on the plan Greitens outlined (you can read his original remarks hereand here):

1. Set a great example.

Like any self-improvement program, increasing resiliency requires demonstrating a commitment. And if you hope to inspire others, such as your children, it’s doubly important.

“To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, who you are will speak more loudly to your children than anything you say,” says Greitens. “If they see you always able to pick yourself up when you’ve been knocked down, that’s behavior they’re going to adopt intuitively.”

2. Take responsibility.

Responsibility here means over everything that you can control in your life. There are things you can’t control, sure–but know the difference.

“Teach your children early not to pass the blame or make excuses, but to take responsibility for their actions” says Greitens.

Read more:

Reinventing the library by Alberto Manguel

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The Oberlausitzische Library of Sciences in Gorlitz, Germany. Credit Florian Monheim/Arcaid via Corbis

Plato, in the “Timaeus,” says that when one of the wisest men of Greece, the statesman Solon, visited Egypt, he was told by an old priest that the Greeks were like mere children because they possessed no truly ancient traditions or notions “gray with time.” In Egypt, the priest continued proudly, “there is nothing great or beautiful or remarkable that is done here, or in your country, or in any other land that has not been long since put into writing and preserved in our temples.”

Such colossal ambition coalesced under the Ptolemaic dynasty. In the third century B.C., more than half a century after Plato wrote his dialogues, the kings ordered that every book in the known world be collected and placed in the great library they had founded in Alexandria. Hardly anything is known of it except its fame: neither its site (it was perhaps a section of the House of the Muses) nor how it was used, nor even how it came to its end. Yet, as one of history’s most distinguished ghosts, the Library of Alexandria became the archetype of all libraries.

Libraries come in countless shapes and sizes. They can be like the Library of Congress or as modest as that of the children’s concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the older girls were in charge of eight volumes that had to be hidden every night so that the Nazi guards wouldn’t confiscate them. They can be built from books found in the garbage, like the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., set up in 1980 by the 24-year-old Aaron Lansky from volumes discarded by the younger generations who no longer spoke the tongue of their elders, or they can be catalogued in the mind of their exiled readers, in the hope of resurrection, like the libraries plundered by the Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories of Palestine. It is in the nature of libraries to adapt to changing circumstances and threats, and all libraries exist in constant danger of being destroyed by war, vermin, fire, water or the idiocies of bureaucracy.

Read more: http://nyti.ms/1R0E2G8

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Effectively Communicating Info Pro Value by Mary Ellen Bates

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How to Be Emotionally Intelligent by Daniel Goleman April 7, 2015

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Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

What makes a great leader? Knowledge, smarts and vision, to be sure. To that, Daniel Goleman, author of “Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence,” would add the ability to identify and monitor emotions — your own and others’ — and to manage relationships. Qualities associated with such “emotional intelligence” distinguish the best leaders in the corporate world, according to Mr. Goleman, a former New York Times science reporter, a psychologist and co-director of a consortium at Rutgers University to foster research on the role emotional intelligence plays in excellence. He shares his short list of the competencies.

1. SELF-AWARENESS

Realistic self-confidence: You understand your own strengths and limitations; you operate from competence and know when to rely on someone else on the team.

Emotional insight: You understand your feelings. Being aware of what makes you angry, for instance, can help you manage that anger.

2. SELF-MANAGEMENT

Emotional balance: You keep any distressful feelings in check — instead of blowing up at people, you let them know what’s wrong and what the solution is.

Self-motivation: You keep moving toward distant goals despite setbacks.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/how-to-be-emotionally-intelligent.html?WT.mc_id=2015-KWP-AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&kwp_0=25455&kwp_4=174840&kwp_1=169030&_r=0