Resume & Interview Tips: A Tech Hiring Manager’s Perspective

I’m often asked to help with resume feedback and interview tips, and it has become even more frequent now that the tech market is tightening. I’ve implemented tech hiring processes across multiple teams and companies and usually am deeply involved in candidate screenings, so this post consolidates my thoughts and perspectives, as well as some “behind the scenes” into how the hiring process works.

Job Posting and Resume Screening

Before a job is posted, a company recruiter gets assigned to support the specific role. The hiring manager will provide the job description to the recruiter, and they will meet so the hiring manager can provide information about the role such as the team, tech stack, projects, and the type of candidate they are looking for. Sometimes this is a technical recruiter with experience hiring for tech roles, and sometimes it’s a recruiter that hires for multiple disciplines and not directly specialized in tech. This is the first person you will get to interact with.

As applications start to come in, it’s common that only the recruiter will receive notifications so they can screen and filter out as much noise as possible. The goal here is to do a “smell test” and filter out resumes that are clearly not a fit for the role, and pick which ones will get scheduled for a phone screening with the recruiter.

If the recruiter is not specialized in tech, or still getting familiar with the role or space, they might ask the hiring manager to help with this screening, but over time the recruiter tends to do this initial screening on their own. The recruiter will usually filter based on the their knowledge of what the hiring manager provided, look for specific keywords, and ensure that the resume meets some hard requirements like years of experience, education, and location.

Reasons you might get filtered out at this stage:

• Your resume doesn’t match the job description, either because you are really not a fit, or you are not conveying the right information so that a recruiter can understand.
• Your resume might fit the job description, but if the volume of qualified applications is high, the recruiter is prioritizing stronger resumes to send through next steps.
• There are other strong candidates reaching later stages of the interview process, someone already has an offer pending, or going through background check, so they are not looking to add more candidates to the pipeline even though they left the role open in case those other candidates fall through.
• Sometimes the hiring manager already has someone in mind, posting online and interviewing is just a formality to comply with HR policies (I know it’s lame). This is more common in larger companies.

Tips:

• Fine-tune your resume to the specific job requirements. Make it easy for someone quickly scanning your resume to get a sense that you are a fit for this role. This might sometimes mean removing things that are not relevant.
• Be pro-active on potential red flags. For example, if you have gaps, try to fill it with some note or explanation. Otherwise, you are leaving room for interpretation.
• Be honest on your resume. I understand the urge to make it look as impressive as possible, but note that most companies will perform a background check, job history, and education check, usually after you have received the offer (which will be noted as “contingent on passing background checks”). Those verifications are commonly performed by a third-party, and their goal is to try to collect enough evidence of your background matching what you’ve put on the resume. They might ask letter of verification from former employers, or even ask for W-2’s for every year you worked if the company isn’t around anymore. I’ve seen instances of offers being rescinded due to titles being misrepresented, or unfinished degrees listed as completed, etc. The consequences here are not only losing the job, but also burning bridges with the company.

Recruiter Phone Screening

The recruiter will then reach out to schedule a phone screening. This is usually 15-30 minutes long. They will talk about the company, the team, the role, maybe go into benefits and perks, and then they will ask you a few questions, which can range from “tell me about yourself” to “what are your salary expectations”, but they can also get into some skills related questions, which might have been provided by the hiring manager to help with the screening. Here is important to note that the recruiter will ask you questions that will sound technical but chances are they are clueless about what you will be talking about. They are just asking questions provided by the hiring manager and they might have difficulty understanding all names and terms you mentioned. For example, “describe the list of AWS services you are most proficient with”. If you list a bunch of letter soup acronym like “EC2, S3, RDS, etc” the recruiter might not know what those are, while trying to keep up with transcribing your answer. I recommend keeping this in mind and trying to answer technical questions as if you are talking to a non-technical person: talk slowly, provide context (ie.: “compute services like EC2 and ECS, storage services like S3”) to ensure less things get lost in translation to be shared to the hiring manager later.

After this initial call, if you are able to pass the recruiter criteria and not get filtered out at this stage, the recruiter will share your resume, as well as your answers from this initial screening, to the hiring manager.

Reasons you might get filtered out at this stage:

• Your non-technical answers could indicate a lack of fit for the company or team culture, or if skills questions were asked you might not have provided enough depth or context to demonstrate your knowledge.
• Same as before, other strong candidates might be progressing through the pipeline so they will hold off on moving new interviews to next step.

Tips:

• Be prepared to answer questions about your resume, and be ready to provide examples of your work. This is a good time to ask questions about the role, the team, and the company.
• Be mindful on how to answer technical questions to the recruiter, as noted above.
• You might be asked salary expectations. This is a tricky question and I recommend doing some research on how to answer it in advance (this is big topic on it’s own and there’s a lot of existent advice on this topic so I won’t dive much into it). My tip here is mostly don’t get caught off guard and providing an answer that will handicap you later on. Think on how you will answer it prior to getting on the call.
• Ask questions about the process to the recruiter, including what the hiring manager is really looking for, and what to expect on next interviews. The next steps of the interviews are not meant to be a “Gotcha!” moment so if you can get some insight on what the hiring manager is looking for you can better prepare. I’ve been happy to provide additional information to candidates that asked me about the process.
• If you get some additional insight about the role that you think your resume doesn’t convey it, you can ask the recruiter if you can update your resume, which can help you being prioritized on the next steps.

Hiring Manager Resume Review

When the recruiter shares your resume and questions with the hiring manager most of the time your resume is shared in a batch of resumes, maybe anywhere between 5 or 10. The hiring manager will then review resumes with more attention to let the recruiter know the set of candidates that the hiring manager wants to proceed with in the interview. I’d say that at this point that only about 20% of the resumes end up getting scheduled for an interview. The hiring manager will provide the list of people to the recruiter to schedule screening calls, sometimes rank by priority.

There’s a limited bandwidth that a team can dedicate to interviews, since team members are juggling their time between projects and interviews. If there’s a high volume of candidates the interviews might end up queued, where the hiring manager will decide “let’s schedule interviews with A, B, and C first, and then we can look at D, E, and F”. However, there’s no guarantee that D, E, and F will ever get an interview. While they were queued, the hiring manager might have received another batch of resumes, and they might be stronger than D, E, and F, or they might be really confident on an ongoing candidate, so those can start falling out of priority.

When I’m reviewing those batches of resumes, I’d say I spend less than a minute on each resume at this phase: most resumes I’ll scan very quickly for things I’m looking for, or lack of, or red flags. For example, one of the latest roles I was hiring for was a Director of MLOps. I would scan the resume to quickly answer the following:

• do they have experience with ML frameworks?
• have they managed teams and other leaders before?
• does this person has experience on our cloud provider? If not, do they at least have strong experience on another cloud provider?
• does it seems like they managed platforms before? Or juggled multiple projects at once?

Is a minute really enough to review a resume? Not for a full hiring decision, but the goal here is just to looking for making a decision on whether this person shows enough to move to the next step. I will thoroughly review resumes right before the interview.

Tips

• Like mentioned above, resumes are scanned quickly on this phase, so make sure to highlight the most relevant information. Use bold, italics, and bullet points to make it easy to read.

• Keep each job history on the resume concise. I’ve seen a lot of resumes that list a bunch of projects that the person been involved on. Not only it becomes a wall of text, but considering that projects are a team effort, my goal is to understand your real role and contribution. Did you make a real difference on that project? Or you “just happened to be there”? Focus on trying to convey your real contribution, even if less impressive than the project itself. If you really want to throw the kitchen sink on the resume in case there’s some keyword that might catch the recruiter eye, I recommend having a separate section for “Additional Projects” so you can list everything else, while keeping the job history focused on your core contributions.

• Things that Impress Me

  • Code repo with open source projects: contribution to established open-source projects is a really strong signal to me. Most established projects have great technical standards so if you are getting merges on those projects it demonstrates you can fit that bar, that you can navigate guidelines, and has collaboration skills. I also put a lot of value on personal projects, even if not large, but that is actively iterated or maintained. It conveys to me passion for the craft and ownership.
  • Thoughtful blogs: Blog posts that aim to share new knowledge or insightful point of views. An example here is Matt Dupree Philosophical Hacker. As a contracts, a post on “how to setup a Kubernetes cluster on AWS” with a bunch of copy-pasted commands and very little explanation or improvement on existing documentation is not very impressive.
  • Job experience at companies that has strict hiring processes (ie.: FAANG): those companies itself have higher bars for hiring, so someone that has passed that bar once can be a strong signal. I would generalize that as well to elite schools with strong technical programs.

• Things That Don’t Impress Me

  • Certifications: this rarely moves the needle, with some rare exceptions (ie.: AWS Professional Architect, which has a tough exam, and hard to pass with just superficial knowledge, online course, and no real experience), specially for more senior roles. This is because certifications alone rarely prove that your skills translates to real-world experience, which is what I’m looking for most of the time. If you can demonstrate real-world experience through your job history, then certifications at that point are moot.
  • Repos with exercises from classes or online courses: it’s really hard to tell on those repos how much of the code you wrote, was handed out, etc. The simple completion of those exercises rarely implies knowledge or mastery in the subject. For more junior roles I might use some of the exercises as a conversation starter to see how they approached the problem (for more senior roles I’d likely use professional experience only instead).
  • Word salad of languages and skills: Resumes usually list languages and tools that a person claim experience on. The challenge with those is that I realize people will throw anything there, even if they only touched it once in their life, so it’s hard to separate what is something the person is proficient or not. NOTE: I still recommend having this on resume as it can help prevent you from early filtering by tech recruiter based on keywords alone.

Technical Screenings

Those are either some code challenges or system design interviews administered by the technical folks on the team. Coding interview and system designs are not a perfect representation of the day-to-day work, specially with the peer pressure of an interview, but it’s still one of the best approach that companies have to assess a candidate’s skills.

Depending on the role and company, this might be one or two interviews, or you might have series of technical interviews with different groups. For the latter one, before you are sent into it, you might do one “lightweight” technical interview with a single person. This is an early filtering to make sure you at least know how to code or have a basic foundation before sending you through a battery of coding and system design interviews. I won’t dive too deep into the technical interviews because this is usually the type of advice that is most available around blogs and youtube.

Tips:

• Ensure you understand the challenge before you start. I see so many folks jumping into solutions without really understanding the problem.
• Over communicate: share your your plan on how you will tackle the problem, and share your thought process as you go, including parts you have doubts on.
• Don’t treat tools as black boxes that just magically work. I lost count of times where I’m trying to have a candidate design a system with specific constraints of latency or scale, where the part of the challenge is assessing the right data structure, partitioning, indexing, carefully thinking Big O of each operation, defining what things might be read or write time computed, etc, and the candidate instead just throws a “I’ll just use Redis, it’s fast and should handle all that”.

Offer Stage

Before the market got tight, I would say to folks (not people I was interviewing, but people that asked me for advice) that once you get through all interviews you are most likely getting an offer. This is because the talent pool was smaller, so we rarely were at a point where we had multiple strong candidates that met our bar. At times, after exhaustive search, we had to lower the bar to fill a role. Today things are a bit different: you might kill it at all the interviews and still not get an offer because someone else was stronger. (More common for junior roles. Strong candidates especially in cloud, AI, data, etc. are still very competitive).

If you are not receiving timely response or offer after all the interviews, it’s likely one of the following reasons:

• there’s a couple more candidates at the end of the pipeline as well that they want to wait before making a final decision
• your offer might be stuck in compensation discussions

Once the hiring manager makes a decision they will recommend to the recruiter to offer you the position, and the recruiter will start working with compensation team to come up with an offer.

Depending on how long the official offer takes, the recruiter might reach out and informally let you know that they expect to move forward with an offer, but it won’t give you the specifics yet. For them to get an official offer out they will need to work with a HR compensation team.

The hiring manager will provide some guidance on where they think this person would fit for the role: should they be at the lower-end, mid, or higher of compensation, or even if it should be considered a different level for this person. The recruiter will share this information with the compensation team, which will then assess this information alongside market rates, internal equity (what peers on that team are currently being compensated), and skills you have on paper: years of experience, degrees, previous companies, and sometimes what you answered about expected compensation. Once they have a compensation package, they will share it with the hiring manager for feedback. Depending on the candidate, the hiring manager might want to influence the offer in one direction or another, and it might take some back-and-forth until the hiring manager approves, and then the compensation is shared with the candidate. Most of the time here the hiring manager will be trying to advocate on behalf of the candidate to get the best offer possible, but sometimes they might be constrained by internal policies and compensation bands.

Offer negotiation is an entire topic on its own, so my goal here is just to explain the process, but not focusing on negotiation tips (there’s a lot of content out there from folks that are much better than me at this).

Final Thoughts

I see a lot of posts online sharing frustration with interview process, which I can understand. I’ve been on the other side of the table, and I know how frustrating it can be to go through a long process that resemble an obstacle course that isn’t really assessing what you will be doing on the job, only to be rejected at the end with little feedback or explanation.

But understanding the challenges from the hiring side can help you navigate the process better: Hiring is a time-consuming process, and the hiring manager and interviewers are likely juggling multiple roles at once. The hiring decision is a huge responsibility that needs to be done with imperfect information, and hiring managers are constrained by the process and policies of the company, which can be frustrating for both sides.

I hope this post helps you understand the process better, and gives you some tips to improve your chances of getting hired. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out!