Candidate Summaries

Going Beyond the Resume

William Wong August 2017

We are in the business were people, sell people, to other people - and a candidate summary is where the selling aspect comes into play. This is a vital component in the process, but unfortunately it is also one of the areas where many Recruiters (both agency and corporate) can use a tune-up on. Many summaries simply fail to properly convey the correct messaging that prompts a call-to-action (an interview). The culprit? They're not asking the right questions.

Aside from general housekeeping questions (e.g work authorization, commute, ability to pass a background check, etc.), there is an array of essential topics to cover like the candidate's desires/interests, ballpark comp requirements, what the competition looks like, how much time we have left, etc. While those are all important, the primary objective of the summary is to highlight why your candidate is so great for the job (value proposition).

All too often I see Recruiters try to push a resume with very little content to back it up (they rely too much on the resume itself). And if there is any - it's often vague, opinionated and inconsistent with what the manager is looking for. The purpose of this article is to help guide any recruiters interested in sharpening their investigation skills.

Wins Trust: This is where you separate yourself from every other spaghetti flinging recruiter out there and actually talk about what the hiring manager wants. This is where you flaunt the intel you extracted from the candidate - information that wasn't even in the resume in the first place. Building trust now will help you not only get future resumes reviewed faster, but they're also more likely to listen to your guidance during the interview/closing stages.

Conversation Starter: Your summary should highlight relevant aspects of the candidate's background to act as a launchpad for the interviewer to explore further.

R.O.T.I: It's an acronym, not a food, and stands for Return on Time Invested. Think about how much time it took to get that sub. How many profiles had to be sourced, how many emails, phone calls, voicemails, texts, rejections. Think about everything you've done up to this point to get this submittal. Now, are you going to just toss this candidate in and hope the resume sells itself? Or are you going to do everything humanly possible to make sure it gets an interview?

It's our Job: Talent Acquisition is not the hiring manager/screener's primary function at the company. They are not professional resume readers and not as effective/efficient in reviewing profiles as you are (especially if it's in bulk). Help them spend as little time as possible figuring out which candidates to interview so they go back to their real job.

Attention Span: Your HM/screener has other priorities to focus on. Just like the synopsis on the back of a book, we really only have several seconds to convey why our candidate deserves an interview. Use it wisely and make it count. In today's war for talent, time really does kill all deals. An effective summary creates faster response time from the team.

Why even bother?

Reconnaissance Report

So, how do we go about doing this? How do we craft a winning writeup? Figured I might as well get it from the horse's mouth, so I've surveyed over one thousand managers to hear their thoughts. Here's what they had to say:

[ 1 ] Everyone and their grandma is providing candidate summaries (either at the top of resumes or in the body of an email), but because they're so bad, HMs are starting to ignore them like how we ignore the skills section of resumes. So how do we win back their attention? The first step is to make sure what you're trying to convey actually looks presentable. If it's pleasing to the eye, chances are, they'll read it.

[ 3 ] HM/screeners have a busy schedule, which means their window for reviewing resumes is very short. They know it's important to look at profiles as they come in, but feel it takes time/concentration to review them. If a candidate profile doesn't jump right out at them within a few seconds, they'll delay the review process to when they have more time on their hands (which may never happen because more and more items get piled on their plate).

They also feel what the recruiter says in the summary is too surface level and are just listing skills from the resume vs. telling us a story of how that person utilized that skillset (e.g a recruiter will say a candidate has 4 years of Angular exp vs. talking about the Angular projects they worked on and what the candidate contributed. To combat this, what we say about a candidate needs to be relevant, detailed and concise.

My Precious

The real estate for summaries is extremely valuable. Don't waste it talking about random things.

Figure out manager's top 3-4 asks, and talk about how the candidate fits those needs.

For each of the items above, be as detailed as possible.

[ 2 ] Managers think summaries are too salesy and contain more opinions from the recruiter about the candidate vs. facts (e.g utilizing descriptive words like excellent, guru, SME, etc). Summaries are just full of fluff so it's not very useful. They are unsure if Recruiters are actually talking to candidates about specific topics, or if they're just regurgitating what they read on the resume.

Fake News

Only state facts, not opinions.

Don't make things up.

Do not copy/paste from resume. Ask candidates to provide details in their own words.

Eye Candy

Break up important topics into bullet points. Bold the key topics.

Don't write in one big paragraph.

The HM/screener should have a clear picture of what you're trying to convey with just a quick glance of the summary.

Combat Drills

Alright, so everything sounds simple yes? All we need to do is figure out the top 3 things the manager wants, and then talk about it. So why then are summaries so hard to write? It's because on paper it sounds easy but can be very challenging in practice. But that's why we call it practice, you have to do it over and over until it becomes second nature. This isn't something you can teach once and they'll get it right away (there's simply too many scenarios, technologies and job functions to learn in one sitting). I have the following set up for my teams:

Occurrence: Bi-weekly workshop. ~30 minutes.

Participants: Normally run these in a squad of 3 or 4. Any more and you lose focus. I act as the moderator. Each TA member will present the following:

Brecourt Manor Assault, 4th Infantry Division. 6 June 1944

Battle Plan:

Job Description: They pick one job that they worked on from the past two weeks and share the unedited/ original JD with the team. I want everyone to see how vague some of these job descriptions can be, or how crazy some required skills can get.

Refined JD: Next, they share the questions they had on this req. What required more clarification? Did they have to renegotiate skillsets with the HM? Did they change any wordings? Share the refined Job Description with the team.

The Mark: What are the crucial elements of this search? Narrow it down to 3 or 4 items. Share those with the team.

Paraphrase the Job: In their own words, briefly describe the job (and any technologies along with it) and what the candidate will be doing. As their coach, listen to see if they are providing substance in this pitch vs. just reading from the JD. Having a keen understanding of the job will help them with candidate qualification and know what to include in the candidate summary.

Candidate Summary: Share the write-up with the team. Also share the resume so the team can see how this information was extracted.

Critique: Chance for everyone else to share their thoughts.

Below are some materials to guide the team on how to participate in these workshops.

Dossier: 1918D.47B.12U

Windows Drivers Exp
PCIe Experience
MS Certification (preferred)

[ III ] The Mark

[ IV ] Paraphrase the Job

Google developed a product called EdgeTPU that allows you to run AI in the field. It's the size of a paperclip, can do 4 trillion operations per second and you can plug it into any device that has a M.2 interface. So basically you can install this chip say onto a windmill and you can use it to calculate bird migration pattern, atmospheric changes or maybe even detect UFOs. This is all done in the field.

Right now they're expanding that capability into Windows machines, so we need someone to develop a Windows PCIe Driver for them. They really need someone to have worked on a Windows Driver within the last 3 years and if you've helped it go thru MS Cert, that's even better.

[ I ] Original JD

[ II ] Questions / Refined JD

[ V ] Candidate Summary

Is PCIe experience required? Would you consider candidates w.o PCIe but has experience with other interfaces (e.g USB, SATA, SCSI, SAS, etc.)
There are candidates that purely specialize in driver development and then there are others that develop drivers as part of their jobs. Would you consider a candidate that hasn't developed a driver in their last job? If so, what would you say is the cut off time frame? 1 year, 3 years, 5 years ago? There are plenty of linux driver developers and not a whole lot of windows guys. Need some flexibility here.
How helpful would it be to find someone that has helped an organization go thru MS cert? Will this role require our candidate to do this? Will the team provide any help/guidance for folks w.o this expertise?
Where are you at with this project? Is someone already working on this or do we need to start from scratch?

Jane has over 10 years of Windows Driver development experience.

Windows 10 Drivers: 1 year at Microsoft (2016-2017) helping develop all kinds of low level drivers that sit right on top of the UEFI stack. This is for their Surface products. Very familiar with KMDF. He was the only developer working on this.
PCIe Experience: 1 year @ Dell for their NVMe storage subsystem. Also worked on PCIe at Microsoft and Samsung. He has also developed drivers for USB, SATA, SCSI, and SAS.
MS Certification: took the driver @ Dell thru MS Certification within 7 months. Samsung took over a year to get certified because they were developing the SOC at the same time (had to wait for the SOC to be complete)
Fortune 500: worked for Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, Intel and Sun

This example is for a contract job thru an MSP and did not have access to the HM. Our questions were relayed to the manager thru the MSP. The summary was placed at the top of the resume and because of this, it needed to be brief/concise

Jane holds a PhD in CS and is completely comfortable programming in C++ and Python.

Algorithm: At Inscopix he was an algorithm developer (created his own as well as researched and adopted those in libraries/literature). The company developed a solution to figure out how neurons are firing inside mice’s brain and according to what behavior (they genetically manipulate a gene in the mouse’s brain so when you shine an ultraviolet light it flourishes and you can see the calcium iron and can see the neurons in front of a tiny camera). The product is sold to neuro science research labs. His lab was to look at these signals and build software that can detangle the signals. These neurons get stacked up upon each other and you can’t tell which one has fired. Using math he can untangle the signals. He also did a lot of work with image stabilization. When the animal is moving, the brain slushes around a bit so he worked on how to stabilize the image.

Programming: Implementation is in C++. He said C++ was his first and strongest language. When he develops the algorithm, he sees them thru and follow the process all the way to implementation. He also uses matlab and recently python/machine learning.

Misc: No AR/VR exp, but other stuff he worked on was motion inferences which involves lots of geometry. He’s worked on stereoscopic vision, monocular 3D reconstruction (had a single camera that’s moving around and you can infer the camera position and structure). If it got too difficult he would use a stereo camera so at least you know the separation of two cameras. That has a lot of math and transforms, motion transforms, 6 degree of freedom inference. He has many publications on image processing/computer vision.

Is AR/VR/xR required for this job?
Would you consider someone with academic exp with 1 or 2 years of industry exp?
Is C++ a hard requirement? Would you consider other languages? What is the split between math/programming?
Describe to me your perfect candidate? What would this person bring to the table? Which of these qualities are required and which are preferred?

[ V ] Candidate Summary

[ II ] Questions / Refined JD

[ I ] Original JD

We are developing an Augmented Reality product for the education space. Our core business is within the K-12 market but have recently branched out into Colleges, Medical and Trade Schools. There's many AR/VR products out there, but ours is revenue generating and we have trained over 10s of thousands of students. Right now we're looking for someone to help them further develop their Computer Vision algorithms. So someone strong in the sensor-fusion space but if you have hand-gesture that would be a huge plus. Implementation is done in C++, so you'll have to be comfortable with programming - it's about an 80/20 split with math/programming. No need for AR/VR background.

[ IV ] Paraphrase the Job

[ III ] The Mark

Sensor Fusion Algorithms
Programming Exp (C++ preferred)
VR/AR/xR and hand gesture a huge plus.

Dossier: 4272S.EV1.ERT

This example is for a FTE role with an internal client, with direct access to the HM. The candidate summary was provided in the body of an email to the HM.

This example is for a FTE role with an internal client, with direct access to the HM. The manager didn't have a job description so we came up with one for him. The candidate summary was provided in the body of an email to the HM.

Prior exp managing a team of 6-10 employees and ability to navigate/partner with other departments (e.g. dev, product, marketing, customer, etc.)
Hands on exp on manual + automation (sikuli preferred)
AR/VR/XR preferred but not required.

[ III ] The Mark

[ IV ] Paraphrase the Job

Need a manager/director to lead the charge on all things QA for an AR/VR startup. Will be managing a team of 6 (4 onsite and 2 offshore). One is automation and the rest is manual. This is a small team so the expectation is you'll be very hands-on but still provide strategic oversight. For automation they're using Sikuli. AR/VR is preferred but not required. In terms of tech stack, your team will cover the entire product from firmware (C/C++) to SDK (C++) to APPs (C#).

[ I ] JD

[ II ] Questions / Refined JD

[ V ] Candidate Summary

Tell me about your QA team in terms of: size, roles, function, seniority, location.
What are your expectations for this manager within day 30, 90, 180. Are there any major initiatives that you'd like him/her to spearhead?
What is the state of the QA team? I'm trying to figure out if this person will be stepping into a functioning ship or one that has holes in it.
What is the breakdown between strategic and tactical duties? Will this manager need to roll up his/her sleeves? Be technical?
In terms of tech stack, does this team cover the entire product? Can you break down the components (e.g. firmware, sdk, app, etc.)
Do you currently utilize any type of automation? If so, what is it and who's currently managing/developing it?
Who does the QA Director report to? Is QA seen as it's own entity and as an equal to Development, or are they seen as a subset of dev?
Is industry knowledge required or preferred?
Does the team know you're looking for a replacement? If so, may I connect with your team members to drive for referrals?
If a candidate has any questions, who would be the best person to relay them to? Would that be you?

Management Exp: 6 years at Symantec. Currently managing 8 people. His peak was 2 years ago at 15 people (San Jose, Seattle, India, Japan, China). Half of these folks were manual testers and half of them were SDETs writing code for automation harness. Still very hands on and understands this job will require him to get his hands dirty.

AR/VR exp: Was at Oculus and works on the core team that releases for their Rift S product (PC powered). He works on testing both firmware/hardware and the headset SW. When he first joined the group he was working on the mobile side, but later switched to working on their product that is tethered to a PC for enhanced computing power. Pace is extremely fast here, with changes daily and release every 2 weeks.

Sikuli: He has experience with this – used it both at Yahoo and Symantec. Knows the product really well and understands its strengths/limitations. He also provides architectural design for their automation needs. Programs in Java and Python.

Environment: Jira + Jenkins + GIT/Stash (built from scratch). Also has a little exp with AWS.

Reason for looking: Symantec placed his products in sustainable mode so there will not be any new features in the near future. He doesn’t want to stay in an environment like this.

Dossier: 59DK1.JDH.837