Hiring

I am not sure how hiring managers look at my resume when I apply for jobs, but when I'm hiring, no matter if I am in well established, globally recognized company, or in this tiny little pathetic local office, I always wonder, how come the economy is so bad, but I still cannot hire anyone good and capable.

Recently the resume I received probably explained some of my questions.

Our job title is Mechanical Engineer. We are looking for someone with mechanical design and manufacturing experience. Our company name and website are also published, so it should not be a problem to find out information about our products and job description. However, the resume I received really contains little relevant information.

The first page only shows his education history, professional capability, project he has worked on (Nokia xxxx really does not tell me anything other than that he probably worked on cell phone projects before), and his thesis, which is mostly on fluid mechanics.

Education and the thesis that one spends 2 years on is important to the individual, however, it is really irrelevant to the position that we open. With 5 years' experience, I really hope this candidate can explain more about what he does on the job, the people he interacts with, and his achievements in the project. Good degree from a good school provides a good baseline of this candidate, at least, he can do research independently, but I really do not want to know his majors and the courses he has taken, unless it's absolutely related to the job.

The second page is his self introduction, or autobiography, a common requirement here for candidates. He starts with "Your job posting came to my attention while exploring opportunities in the area of engineering...". Sounds interesting. Then he, again, explain his academic study, in car dynamics, and his current job. Basically I know he works on finite element simulation. That's all. I can draw such simple conclusions from 2 long paragraphs. All I can say is, if he ever spent few minutes looking at our products or our job description, he would have come up with something else on his resume, really.

I am almost sure this is a generic resume he sends out to every company. If we have the resource to train and wait for him to come up with the speed, we may try. He has not shown any compatibility between him and our position after all. With 5 years' experience, he should be able to present himself in resume better. He may be capable, and has done a lot to analyze model, or even influence designers to change the design before it's too late, but I do not see any result from the resume, and how can I know it if he does not say so in the resume?

It is really not that hard to get my attention. The problem is most of the resumes are too generic. It seems that those candidates want to use the same resume to apply for any job by giving out as little as information as possible.

I told our HR, we can put his resume aside and review if we should get him for an interview maybe few weeks later based on his good record of schools. Reading resume and interviewing really are time-consuming process. How can they just send out resumes just like that? Well, it is really beyond my imagination.