Now that we’ve thought carefully about our hiring standards and developed the interview questions that will serve as our hiring criteria, it’s time to start looking at candidates.

If you’ve skipped our guidance on creating your hiring criteria and behavioral interview questions, be careful: Without knowing what to look for, screening résumés is much harder.

Screening résumés is your first step in whittling down the interested and potentially competent candidates into a manageable group to interview. We know lots of managers who screen résumés when they’re doing other things, and consider it a chore.

This is a mistake. Hiring is important. Screening résumés is part of hiring. Doing something important while doing something else is galactically stupid.

Smart résumé screening saves you a lot of time later in your process. You’ll know more about what to look for overall, and also more about each candidate who makes it through the screening.

Here’s what to look for when you’re screening résumés.

Titles—What to Look For

First things first: Look at the titles of jobs the candidate has had over his or her career. We’re not looking for a successful career path at this point, but rather something much simpler: In our opinion, does this person appear to have done the kinds of jobs the right candidate—a true positive candidate—would have done to prepare for the role for which he or she is applying?

We say “appear” because there’s a reasonable amount of variation in job titles, and in some cases, it’s hard to tell, based on a title alone, whether that title (never having come across it before) means the same as this other title in which we have high confidence as a good indicator.

There are plenty of companies in which the “manager” title means someone without a budget (the standard is that someone called manager has a budget). There are places where the “manager” title doesn’t connote responsibility for supervising and developing directs (despite its typical connotation of those aspects). There are places where the title “Director” doesn’t mean “manager of managers,” most notably in technology firms.

There’s also the problem of title inflation at small firms (and even some bigger firms). The thinking goes, “The guy at the top of a billion-dollar revenue firm is called CEO, then if I’m the founder of my three-person start-up, I’m at the top, so I’m CEO, too.”

As a general rule, the problem with small company title inflation is confusing the metrics of “close to the top” and “far from the bottom.” This is a simplification, but to earn a true “C-Suite” title, one not only has to be at the top of a firm, but also far from the bottom. If there are only two layers in a firm, no one ought to be called “senior vice president” of anything, and there isn’t a C-Suite, yet.

These vagaries of the title/job/career naming conventions help us learn an important lesson about screening résumés. It’s important to note on this first of several guidelines that we are not building a series of hard logic “or” gates here, with any one “no” resulting in failure/elimination of the candidate. At the same time, this doesn’t contradict the Manager Tools rule that the purpose of all pre-employment screening is to say no.

How is that possible? We are still absolutely looking for reasons to say no to candidates. The smart manager knows he is far better off ending up with not a single phone interview out of a pile of 20 résumés, all things being equal, than having 15 of those résumé holders scheduled to be screened. While it’s possible that a pile of résumés was that good, it’s unlikely, and 15 out of 20 being judged “good enough for a screen” would suggest insufficient screening standards. For an inexperienced hiring manager, unfortunately, this is compounded by the fact that it gets harder to say no to candidates as the process progresses.

But the reason there’s no easy black-and-white test is the lack of standards for résumés, and the lack of similarity in industries and job titles, and norms and means for responsibilities, and nomenclature. We can’t build a purely logical screening model when there is so much variability in the data (words on the résumés) available to us.

What we have done here is create a list not of black/white either/ors, but rather of data to which to apply your judgment. For job titles, it sounds like, “What do I think of these titles?” “How do I feel about the jobs this person has had?” “Are these the kinds of titles I would expect to see?” “Did others who have this role now have similar/identical job titles when they were considered for this role?”

That said, it would be completely reasonable to look at a series of job titles on a résumé, perhaps, say, from a different industry, be unsure of their significance, and to use your lack of knowledge, and the lack of affirmative data, to decide to put this candidate’s résumé in the “no” pile.

And if you’re thinking you don’t have enough experience to have that judgment yet so you can make a good call, believe us when we say yes you do. Too many of us as managers always seem to be in competition with “the right way to do something, which probably a lot of people know but I don’t.” And this lack of knowing “the right way”—which never really exists—causes us not to trust ourselves. We spend far too much time second-guessing ourselves, taking too long, being uncertain, and taking halfhearted steps.

Rest assured: You have all the judgment and decision-making skills you need for the role you’re in, right now. Yes, you’ll have more and better judgment skills about screening and hiring later in your career than you do now. Yes, you’ll look back and think, Oh my, how did I ever keep any job back then, as little as I knew, and as often as I had to fake it while it felt like everyone else knew what was going on?

But the fact that you don’t have the judgment that comes from the greater experience you’ll have later in your career is a tautology. Of course you don’t, and nobody expects you to. But you are still expected to exercise the judgment you do have and make the decisions that you’re supposed to make, come hell or high water, good outcome or bad, regardless of your inner sense of unpreparedness. Fear of failure is not an excuse for a manager to do nothing, or to take whatever steps you take timidly, without speed and purpose.

If you’re new, one smart way to use that guidance when screening is to say, “If I don’t know, that means ‘no.’” Rather than sitting around wondering what something is/means, and trying to determine whether it’s good, trust yourself that if you’re managing people doing this job, you know the right kinds of jobs that someone should have. If someone doesn’t have them, but you worry that the jobs they have had might be perfect substitutes, think again. Say no to the substitutes and move on.

This is only our first screening step. It’s at the highest level. Don’t automatically start looking deeper into job responsibilities if you don’t like/understand the titles you’re seeing. We are not trying to find what might make the candidate good for us! We’re trying to rule him out.

If you have doubts, say no.

Dates—What to Look For

Now look at dates on the résumé: How long did the candidate hold the positions listed? Were there only three months in the job you really want her to have mastered, but over six years at a preparatory role that isn’t considered terribly difficult at most firms?

We want more experience in the more valuable roles, when possible. We also want to take note of a classic detail mistake in résumés: listing only the years someone was in a role, versus the month and year. If someone lists a role as having been from 2002 to 2003, we don’t know whether he held that role for two weeks or 24 months. A considerable discrepancy. Generally, an absence of the detail of months is an effort to hide short stints or unbalanced stays in certain roles. If it is two years, or even two months, it could be an ethical violation, and a no-brainer elimination.

We’re going to recommend considering saying no if the candidate doesn’t have any roles where she stayed more than a year. Repeated short stints in roles is a bad sign. There are exceptions, but remember: We’re trying to rule people out.

We’re also looking for recency of experience. Having had all of the right titles but having had them five years ago is a strike against a candidate. And this is often a one-strike game.

Believe it or not, we also see résumés without dates, which is an effort to obscure information that we need. Some candidates who have “too much” experience are told to leave dates off. But that’s misleading. It may imply that lack of clarity and truthfulness, and a willingness to withhold reasonable amounts of information, is a reasonable approach to situations of disagreement.

The most likely dates to be absent are those accompanying education. This is typically done to avoid “age-ism”: not hiring someone because of age. We all can do the math, subtracting a candidate’s university graduation year from today’s year and, making the assumption that someone graduated from university roughly at age 21, we can determine age.

Some candidates and recruiters use this logic: Because a date associated with my education might allow you to determine my age, and since for you to discriminate against me because of my age is unlawful, it is quite appropriate for me to not share that information with you. Their refrain is, “I don’t have to include that I was fired from a job (they’re right, they don’t have to), and therefore I will not, to keep you from using that against me. That’s the same as leaving off my graduation year to avoid unlawful discrimination.”

But this is fallacious because choosing not to hire someone because he or she has been fired is completely reasonable and legal, while leaving off a graduation year presupposes an unlawful intent to discriminate.

If someone leaves out enough dates that you feel are reasonable to know, we recommend you say no not because of age (which you may well not be able to tell) but because he has deliberately obscured useful information. Not having enough positives in a résumé is as much a reason to say “no” as having plenty of negatives.

Finally, we’re looking for gaps in employment history. The general rule regarding résumés is that even if a candidate is unemployed (for good or bad reasons), that period of time must be accounted for. Perhaps someone was taking care of a sick spouse or parent. Perhaps someone took a two-year sabbatical and didn’t look for work and didn’t have to. Even though the impetus for the sabbatical was being fired, perhaps, it’s standard for candidates to cover the time period as if whatever he or she was doing was a job. “Jan 99—Mar 01: Caregiver” is a completely appropriate way for someone to account for utility during what could be a time period left unaccounted for.

When it comes to dates, there is a fine line between a résumé that is legitimately “persuasively truthful” and one that is inappropriately “truthfully persuasive.” The former—the right way—starts with truth and attempts to make it as persuasive as possible. The latter starts with a goal of persuasiveness, and attempts to fit truth—selectively, unclearly—into a persuasive narrative.

We have seen too many résumés whose authors can legitimately say, “there’s nothing untrue there,” and we were left with the conclusion that a candidate could not be trusted. Dates are often a way to make this decision.

Companies—What to Look For

Most managers look at jobs almost exclusively. But the same job title at two different companies can be quite different. Depending on the quality, size, industry, stability and growth of the firm, the candidate was responsible for bigger or smaller tasks, had to meet lower or higher quality standards, worked with more effective or less effective people, used systems like or different from yours, etc.

Some companies provide notably better experience than other companies. Experience with the best companies is two to three times better than with most others.

The question this raises, of course, is which companies are better than others, and why. For that there is no easy answer, but there are some general rules.

The first key to thinking about the company experience of a candidate is to find out what you can about whom they worked for. When you see a name of a firm that you don’t know, don’t assume that you can’t learn information that is useful to your screening process. If you have a candidate in your maybe pile, find out about the companies you don’t know about. Remember through all of this process, though, that you’re not looking for reasons to rule someone in, but rather to rule someone out.

Certainly, for some more well-known companies, you have some general knowledge. And you can find public information about public companies. For some companies that are perhaps close competitors to you, you have some knowledge.

• Companies that are growing provide better experience than those that stay the same size. Growth generally means success. That means more responsibilities over time in the same role, which means learning and development. It means working with new, different people over time, which means increasing need for better people skills. When we say growth, we don’t just mean number of people; on the contrary, we mean revenue and/or profit growth. The very best companies, when results improve, do not hire more people. They get more out of the ones they have, through productivity gains (which means everyone having to do more).
• This is not to say that working at a shrinking company is necessarily bad. There’s a Cast for That™: Downturn Rite of Passage. Working at one or two companies for a stint while they go through a recession is not a problem and can be good experience.

• Keep in mind that growth for different-sized companies is different. For Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, to grow 10%, they have to add the equivalent of a Fortune 50–sized company to their revenues in one year. That’s impossible (without acquisitions). For a very small company, though, 10% is almost the minimum amount of growth they could achieve and say they’re growing. It just gets harder to grow the bigger you get.

  But a small company that might be staying flat is worthy of some concern. No-growth small-company experience for a candidate often means all kinds of inefficient, internally focused behaviors they’ll bring to you.

While there’s no clear delineator between small and big companies, a good rough rule is about 100 employees. Those 100 employees at a company that doesn’t think it’s small have similar characteristics and tendencies to others with fewer than 100 folks. One hundred to 500 is a good rough estimate of medium-sized, and they are generally—generally—similar. Bigger than 500 is big. They usually have all the characteristics of the biggest companies.

Don’t assume that if you’re not growing you want to hire someone from someplace that isn’t growing. All things being equal, you want someone from some organization that is growing.

If you’re asking someone to make a move from a big to a small company, or vice versa, and that person only has experience in large organizations, that’s a red flag. It’s not a reason to rule someone out, but it is a reason to ask about the change in your interviews, if they progress to that stage.

Another good general rule is to take note, or at least have a concern, when someone is coming to you with significant changes in two corporate characteristics. If someone works in your industry but is in a big company and you’re small, that might be fine. But if he is in a big company and in a different industry (with perhaps no experience in your industry), that presages a challenge.

One way to potentially mitigate this, if you decide to interview a candidate, is to make sure to ask about the systems he used in his previous roles. If someone is “close” for one of your roles, but has never used your systems, never worked with your technology, hasn’t ever managed a budget . . . these kinds of operational disconnects can be a significant detractor to the person’s early effectiveness. Make a note on his résumé to cover that if he is screened or comes in for a face to face interview.

Career Progression—What to Look For

When it comes to thinking about people’s career paths, it’s easy: Ask yourself: Have they grown? The key here is that there are different ways to grow.

If someone has been in basically similar roles for a number of years in one firm, look for increasing responsibilities within that role or significant learning based on industry/technical changes. It might be okay to stay in the same role, but we have to see increasing mastery of the skills needed, learning of new skills in that role, and leading/teaching/mentoring of others in the role or around her. If those kinds of experiences aren’t shown on the résumé, it’s unlikely she has them.

Also, be wary of someone who has been in the same role in a number of different firms of roughly the same size. That’s not only not growth, but it’s potentially problematic in terms of loyalty and relationships.

An important generally accepted rule around career progression is never hire someone into a managerial role in your firm if she’s never managed before. This doesn’t mean you can’t hire a manager from another company into a director role at yours. This is often done when smaller companies hire bigger company managers into director roles, because the scope of a manager’s job at a bigger company is often much greater than the equivalent title at a smaller company.

But hiring an individual contributor from another firm to be a manager at your firm is almost never a good idea.

Responsibilities—What to Look For

Responsibilities usually make up the majority of résumés. The reason they do is because everyone has them. Every job has responsibilities, and they’re relatively easy to find from job descriptions or performance reviews or the like. Responsibilities are the benign, unimportant, low-hanging fruit of résumé preparation.

Responsibilities are useful and even necessary to know. But there is a huge problem with scanning a résumé for responsibilities.

The first is that candidates often bullet-ize responsibilities. Bullets are reserved for accomplishments on effective résumés. Many candidates who put their responsibilities into bullet form know this and are attempting to turn their responsibilities into accomplishments. To an accomplished résumé screener, this suggests low performance.

Remember that someone who has been fired from a job had the exact same job responsibilities as someone who was a high achiever in the role. What this often means is that by bullet-izing an accomplishment, and slightly changing its wording, a candidate can imply—without stating—accomplishing something simply because he was given a responsibility.

This means that we must be especially vigilant to read each bullet and separate those that are actual accomplishments from simply responsibilities. A résumé that has bullet-ized responsibilities and no accomplishments is an enormous red flag. Assume this person has been fired from every job he’s had, or that she is so bad at the job that you’re still going to definitely want to say no.

Assuming we have a résumé with both responsibilities and accomplishments, our key task is determining whether or not the responsibilities are commensurate with the role/title.

Too many of us mistakenly assume that the responsibilities for any role can be safely assumed to be equivalent to those for whatever role we have ever known that shared that same title. But of course this is false, and it leads to a lack of vigilance regarding experience.

Experience isn’t the jobs someone has had. Experience isn’t even the responsibilities she’s had. Experience is the accomplishments she’s achieved in her roles. If you take a job title as a broad-brush equivalency for experience, you’ll miss the situations where the responsibilities diverge from your assumptions. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes bad. But mostly bad.

For each job, take a critical eye to the job title. Assuming it’s a job title about which you have some knowledge, consider what that job title means to you in terms of experience. Think about someone whom you’ve known who is good at that job. And then compare your sense of what that job title means to the responsibilities the candidate lists.

Don’t assume. One of the biggest mistakes we make when interviewing is assuming that what a title or a role or an experience means where we work is the same everywhere else. But company size, company growth, quality of the organization, the manager, and technology all play a role in what a responsibility actually is and means.

A good example of responsibilities being assumed away is when we hire a manager. Lots of us mistakenly assume that manager roles are quite similar. But they’re not. Some managers have three directs; some have 15. Some have to manage contractors; some don’t. Some have to manage across multiple shifts; some don’t. Some managers write performance reviews; some don’t. Some managers have budgets; some don’t. Some managers have clearly defined internal customers; some don’t. Some managers have clearly defined goals; some don’t. Some managers are required to create formal performance development plans; some aren’t. Some managers manage projects; some don’t. Some managers have to manage distant directs; some don’t.

So for each job, ask yourself whether the responsibilities fit the title. Then ask whether or not the responsibilities are sufficient for that role relative to the role you are hiring the person for.

Also, look for increasing responsibilities over a candidate’s career history. More experience (if only in the form of time) means that a good candidate would have increasing responsibilities within each job in addition to moving through higher levels of responsibility in different jobs. Increasing levels of responsibility in each job is especially important in someone whose role has remained relatively stable. A flat career relative to role without increasing responsibilities within that role suggests someone who won’t change, or won’t develop. That might be fine . . . but probably not.

It’s not necessarily a concern that at some point a candidate took a step backwards in responsibility. That may be due to a move to a bigger company, or it could be a career setback. It might be a reason to rule him out; if you’re uncertain, make a note to ask, if they survive this round of scrutiny.

Accomplishments—What to Look For

Ahhhh, accomplishments: the saffron of résumés. Accomplishments are the reason résumés exist, despite all evidence to the contrary. We have seen so many thousands of résumés with bulleted responsibilities we’ve gotten cynical about bullets. It used to be that bullets indicated accomplishments. Now even terminated candidates bullet-ize their résumés.

So it is no longer enough to look for bullets. Too many of us look at a résumé, know that accomplishments are typically indicated by bullets, read a bullet-ized responsibility and call it an accomplishment, and we give credit where credit is not due. When we see a manager do this, we worry not just because of the tactic, but also because it indicates a dangerous strategy of assuming in the positive, which is akin to looking for strengths. But résumé screening, of course, is all about saying “no.” Creating the correct, and negative, confirmation bias is perhaps the most important mental aspect of résumé screening. And interviewing as well.

Here are some simple rules for screening accomplishments:

Education—What to Look For

The value of screening for in the area of educational history diminishes as a candidate develops professional experience. That only makes sense, in that professional accomplishments are much more likely to be predictive of future professional accomplishments than educational accomplishments would be.

But for a more junior professional, effective educational screening is essential, and it is still necessary for many senior candidates.

Ask three questions when thinking about a candidate’s education:

• Is the educational level sufficient?
• What was the quality level of the education?
• How did he perform during his education?

Accuracy—What to Look For

Over half the résumés we see at Manager Tools have errors in them. Twenty-five percent have multiple errors. Accuracy matters on a résumé. Candidates know that accuracy matters, so any mistakes are a reason to be very concerned.

Candidates know that someone looking at their résumés is a go/no-go gate, and they know that accuracy is a right/wrong proposition. If we’re looking for reasons to say no, and we are, we don’t need to look any further than someone who won’t work hard enough to get the details right when getting the details right is a widely understood important factor in a process.

Remember that a résumé is a written document. It is a form of written communication. In written communication, accuracy is considered to be quite important, and a résumé with errors indicates a poor communicator. Have you ever hired someone knowing—knowing—that she was a poor communicator? If you have, you know that you can try to overlook it, but it usually (almost always) ends poorly. That’s because the single most frequent thing most of us do at work every day is communicate. If you’re going to hire someone with inaccuracies on a résumé, you’re hiring a poor communicator, and you’re willfully planning to work with someone who is going to send you lots of emails riddled with errors. And he’s going to do the same to his directs . . . and your customers.

Spelling errors are particularly egregious today. Thanks to word processing, to spell a common word incorrectly almost requires work. It is a sign of hard work, intellect, and attention to detail that people know the difference between homonyms like there and they’re and their, and when to use an apostrophe on the word its.

Contrary to current common wisdom, the speed at which mobile devices allow us to do things is not contrary to accuracy. That speed helps you look up every spelling, every grammar rule, every capitalization rule, in record time. Inaccuracy is not a result of lack of tools or resources. It’s a choice, a behavior, a decision. It’s prioritizing speed over accuracy, in a medium where accuracy is known to be prized and speed is an indicator of lack of preparation.

So look for spelling errors. If you want to forgive one spelling error, fine. We would never recommend you do that, but we’ll understand, and you can hire that candidate. If you’re torn on what to do, put the one-error résumés in your maybe pile.

More than one error, though, is a no. Full stop. Interesting tidbit: The one area (in the United States) where résumés longer than one page stubbornly remain (we understand the reasons) is academia. Often professors’ and researchers’ résumés run to five and six pages. And surely in universities and research departments accuracy and attention to detail matter. But errors on academic résumés occur at a much higher ratio than on corporate/professional résumés.

Density—What to Look For

Density is an often-overlooked area of résumé screening. It illustrates whether or not the preponderance of the candidate’s experience is relevant to your role and industry.

As a general rule, if you are not an experienced manager—in this case meaning having screened résumés many times to decide whom to interview—a low density résumé in the area of relevance to industry/role is a reason to say no.

Many managers think that “there are similarities,” that “commerce is commerce,” that “business is business,” that “marketing is marketing,” that “good developers will become good with any language.” These statements are true . . . and truisms. (A truism is a statement that is true and means nothing.) The fact is, specific knowledge of products and particular industries matters, and taking the time to learn about them on the job is a significant drag on productivity.

Searching for relevance/density also helps us notice nonlinear career choices, lack of perseverance within a career path or an industry. Someone who moves from marketing to sales to customer service, say, in similar roles, and does so in multiple industries without significant accomplishments, and in stints of one to three years, is likely to leave your industry, your role, your company, your team, in one to three years. Are we hiring an employee or a contractor? How much ought we invest in career management for this person? How many conversations will we have with him or her about the future (we do that in One-on-Ones) that will be wasted?

This is not to say that a linear career path is the only way to success. That’s a false dilemma. There are great candidates with unusual backgrounds who could be an outstanding fit for the role you’re hiring for. Candidates with such backgrounds often make that case, sometimes even reasonably well.

But to make that case ourselves is to make the case for reasons to hire. We are not looking for reasons to hire, but rather for reasons to say no. The appropriate response to someone who argues that she could be an excellent hire even though her background isn’t ideal is that in order to do so, we would have to be looking for reasons to hire people, which would open us up to myriad reasons for every candidate to be a good hire, because every candidate does have something to offer. If there are one million possible candidates for any one role, the only logical approach to those one million candidates is to rule people out, not in.

How to Decide Whom to Screen Further

This is the easy part. Armed with these criteria, and looking for reasons to say no, create three piles: No, Maybe, and Yes. It’s completely okay to put a candidate in the Maybe pile if you have a question but his divergence from your ideal isn’t significant.

It’s also okay to remember that there are exceptions to all of the rules we’ve shared. You may just have “a sense” that a particular candidate’s screening problem isn’t as big a deal as it appears. It could be true. Life is never a straight line, and all of us have bumps in our roads to where we are today.

That’s okay. It’s your process. Put them in the maybe pile. Just don’t confuse forgiving a small misstep with deciding to like the candidate. Put him or her in the maybe pile and then work through everyone in your yes pile first.

Try to apply the same criteria through your entire pile of candidates. If you’re being forgiving on, say, industry with one candidate, try to remember to do that with others. Why? Because this process is subjective and far more likely to be affected by mood, desperation, and level of energy (tired screening is likely to mean “no” screening) than is obvious.

Also, start with as many résumés as you can collect. Don’t let HR take your possible pile from 500 to 100 until you know and trust your HR partners because they know you. It doesn’t take that long to say no to those extra 400 résumés. And the more screening someone else who is not deeply engaged in the role you’re hiring for does, the more danger there is that he’s said yes to the wrong candidates.

Once you’ve gone through the whole pool of candidates, you’ll have your three piles. Throw away the “no” pile, unless you want to train your directs and HR on how you screen and why. Set aside the “maybe” pile. Phone screen the “yes” pile.

If you have too many yes’s to screen them all, it’s either time to do a happy dance or to recalibrate your screening process.

Résumé screening and phone screening are your most efficient tools to close in on your one hired candidate. Face-to-face interviewing is your most effective tool to choose precisely “the one.”

Over time, you’ll become adept at screening for the roles for which you hire. This just gives you a basic framework, upon which you can layer your particular situation . . . for something you’ll do perhaps 100 times in your career. If it matters, and you’re going to do it a lot, it’s important to be good at it.