Shortlisting

During the hiring, review CVs and decide who should be progressed to the next step

The What

Identify the candidates from the applicant pool you want to progress. Aka. CV screening. The Talent Acquisition (TA) team or Agency might help you with this.

The How

❤️ Must have

• Hard skills — programming, microservices, data modelling, front end, backend, architecture, system design, problem-solving, strategic thinking

• Working experiences: working years? projects? teams? programming languages? company types, corporate or product & tech, operational or creative, maintenance or development, consultant or own a product?

• Project experiences: languages, platforms, tech stack, frameworks, etc

💛 Good to have

It depends, some candidates care about their personal branding, and they might put more effort into open-source communities, personal blogs, etc. It is a good sign for good candidates but not required.

• Curious about tech, follow up newsletters, attend meetups or conference

• Side projects — crafting code

• Creations: blogs, videos

• Certificates: AWS, GCP, etc

• Short courses or free YouTube videos

🔴 Red Flags

• Many silly typos

• Simple formatting issue

• CV looks like an essay

• Full of soft skills — lack of hard skills

✅ Exceptions

Some candidates may not tick all the boxes you would like to tick, however, you may still be willing to consider them

• High potentials: junior to what you are looking for, but willing to learn and learn fast.

• High motivations

• Does homework and well prepared

📜 Tips

• Make it part of your daily routine, 30 min a day and make it part of your life

• Balance high potential and aligned tech stack

• Leverage Agency or TA team

🕳 Pitfalls

• High experience ≠ high performance

• 1-year experience repeats 10 times ≠ 10 years experience