Screen Resumes With Me! (hiring for our team) 🐙

so I have screened thousands of resumés both for my own company and for other people's companies when I was working there and I'm actually currently screening applications because my team is looking to hire a product marketing specialist so I figured why not show you this full process like in real actual process of screening different portfolios resumés and applications and ultimately making decision on who we're going to interview and who we're ultimately going to hire along the way I also give you some tips on what works and what doesn't work from the perspective of an employer so next time when you're applying for a job hopefully it will help you have a higher chance of Landing it a portion of this video is sponsored by hopspot so for this job posting I made a YouTube post a couple weeks back saying that we're hiring a product marketing specialist to join a team someone who wants to work remote and starting from part-time I also made a post about it on LinkedIn and from that we received 24 applications but there are actually 31 applications that we're currently considering where does the other eight come from well I just mentioned that I'm hiring somebody to my friends and colleagues and I asked say hey do you know anybody who would be interested for this role this is actually pretty common process there's estimates that say between 50 and 80% of jobs are filled just from connections and network and they were never actually publicly posted so because these people came directly from my network they bypassed the rest of these screening processes and they went directly to the interview stage which I will talk about later so yes my number one tip is to try to go through your connections if you're being referred by one of your friends or one of the colleagues then you pretty much have an advantage over everybody else that is applying like you at least get an interview now that I think about it almost every single person on my current permanent team did not come from a direct interview some people showed up on Discord and they're just involved with the community so when I mentioned hey I'm looking for someone to fill the XYZ role they're like oh I could be interested this would be like ecstasy and Ibrahim Vermont one of our full-time editors he just emailed me and followed up multiple times like whenever I got busy and I forgot about the chain he would just like remind me over and over again and I was like okay yes clearly this person wants to work for this team and I should not rude So I responded and that's how it worked out anyways technically the only person that went through the official application process is Rex our operations manager well let's see what's on okay now going back to these applications let us start screening them just to protect the privacy of everybody that applied I made sure to remove all identifying information so first thing I'm going to do even before reading any of this is that I'm going to remove anybody without a portfolio I'll explain why in just a bit nope LinkedIn does not count as a portfolio this person told me to check out a specific Instagram sorry to be kind of harsh here but at least link to Instagram and really should be on part of a portfolio as well spelling mistakes like Instagram not being spelled correctly that's also a really big red flag so that's also going to be a no nope maths AI Python and programming that is not a portfolio all right we have 13 people left let me explain why I just did that so if you look at this job posting you'll notice that this is from a company that is pretty small we have a pretty small team and you also see that the job is remote and starting from part time so this could potentially convert to a full-time position but since it's starting off as part-time this is considered a freelance gig which means that I am hiring you to do something very specific for this company and you can have a great resume that says that you have all these like prestigious schools worked at all these different places but I don't really care about that I want to know if you're able to perform this task and also if you've had other freelance experiences before I want to make sure that I don't need to be holding your hand through how to work as a freelancer there's like this expectation of Independence an expectation of compet outside of a full-time job to be fair if you're applying for larger companies like when I was applying for Goldman Sachs or for like meta and these places you can just directly apply through their company website and they wouldn't really care so much about your portfolios because they probably have automated screening so they'll just Screen through it anyway nobody would actually look at it this also goes for cover letters if it's a larger company especially in Tech they don't really care at all about your cover letters but if you're going for smaller companies like this company or like startups and especially if it is a freelance part-time position then there is an expectation that you will have a portfolio as well as a cover letter in our case this is the part where we said anything else you think we should know it's not as important as the portfolio so I wouldn't screen someone out just because they don't have a cover letter but it does matter a lot because it shows that you made an effort one more tip when it says like email address over here a lot of people apply with their school emails this is fine like there's nothing wrong with doing that and especially if you're going for entry level positions this is like totally fine right you went to a prestigious school that is good but under qualifications here we specifically wrote proven experience in social product marketing preferably in a tech or education sector so this shows that this is a position that is not explicitly entry level so it's actually better if you are not using a school email it's honestly pretty easy just buy a domain it's like a few dollars and then just make an email from a professional looking domain this will make the person feel as if you have more experience than if you were a student as we're looking over some resumes in a bit you may also start being inspired to up your resume game that's why I thought it would be cool to share with you guys that HubSpot actually has a completely free bundle of 12 professionally designed resume templates for Marketing sales and customer servers or really any other job applications my favorite thing is that it's actually labeled and divided into different experiences and different roles there's strategist Specialists entry level and intern they're very well thought out for example for the intern resume it takes into the consideration that you probably don't have that much job experience so there's a bigger emphasis about highlighting yourself and your traits for entry level there's a section that covers School awards while for specialist and strategists there's more of an emphasis on job experience so you can pick your EXP exper level and what things you want to highlight they're completely customizable on Microsoft Word PowerPoint Google Docs and slides like for example if I'm going for a marketing position I would choose this resume because it fits my experience level and also it's yellow and my favorite color is yellow all I have to do like is go here and literally just type in my name you can just fill out all of these things over here and voila you have your own custom resume I highly recommend that you download these templates you can get them with this link over here also linked in description thank you so much HubSpot for providing free resources to help us stand out in the job hunting process and for sponsoring this portion of the video now to the video pardon me sir I'd like to join what are your qualifications for this Ro under qualifications point one which is proven experience in Social product marketing preferably in Tech or education sector as well as an understanding of digital marketing channels and tools like LinkedIn YouTube Instagram whatever these pretty much just we want to know that you've had some experience using these tools before communication collaboration skills you can work as part of a team emphasis on analytical mindset and data we are a very engineering a data heavy team so in order to fit in even if you're doing marketing you need to be very data driven finally creative thinking and problem solving we're not looking for a yes man we're looking for someone who is able to be independent and come up with Solutions themselves and of course being passionate about Ai and education is a plus because you will be marketing for something in AI education so best if you actually know the product why join us blah blah you know we think we're really good and stuff but another big thing to make a note of is that we've been told we're also fun to work with this is something we care a lot about because we wrote something like this and if you actually made an effort to go and look at the YouTube channel look at the things that we're doing you would know that we have a certain like more chill casual kind of vibe and the vibe check is really important and it should be something that we can tell in your application especially in your portfolio do you have the right Vibes to match the Vibes of the company these qualifications and The Vibes actually matter the most because you can teach people some of these key responsibilities as long as they're interested in these key responsibilities but this is kind of like the foundation that we care about the most but let's just quickly go through the key responsibilities as well the whole point of product marketing is to Market our lonely octopus program so we' be developing and executing marketing strategies not a management role in order to drive product awareness collaborate with a bunch of teams blah blah make sure that you're a team player you'll be analyzing market trends so really emphasis that we are very data driven company manage and optimize online marketing campaigns and customer research track and report of performance these are pretty like standard things for marketing rules another key thing I want to point out here something that I would be looking for in the resume and the portfolio is the fact that this is a social media based company we have a YouTube channel we have a strong social media presence so I'm going to be looking for the fact that you as a marketer has done your research all right describe your experience with product marketing so five plus years of experience solo product marketer are two startups so leadership abilities that is great looks like you have things with geni so like engineering experience I like how things are Quantified it looks like you also been in the edtech industry and engaging with 120k Plus users this is super impressive this is a very packed resume product marketing experience that is wonderful go to market strategy a lot of the lingo including LM developers so this is great contract so has freelance experience really like that great that we have some projects that are here hopefully this is something that is shown and also goes more in depth onto portfolio selected work examples oh wow this looks really good damn so webinars videos landing pages looking through some of these samples clearly someone with extensive work experience and contracts and is in the education space AI and Tech space this is just like could be our Dream person but that was only application number one let us see what else we got appreciate the summary let's look at the resume nice one pager love how there's already numbers over here clearly an analytics driven person so marketing specialist Instagram team lead digital marketing and PR intern so amazing lots of experience here so usually when I look at a resume I'll just be a quick screen of Education in this case I don't really care that much about education in this world and I'll also look at their professional experiences anything to Showcase that they've done similar things in the past but the Highlight is going to be in the portfolio which is going to bring color to the resume a lot of these things are going to be blurred out because we don't want to reveal any personal information so first thing I want to comment on in this case we are using Wix as the website just get a custom domain name it's really easy it's something that just makes you look a lot more professional what I love about this portfolio already is that there is clear creativity I love how there's analogies are going on it's very beautiful there's really beautiful illustrations it shows that this person spent a significant amount of effort in making it a good page which is something that you definitely want to see in a marketing specialist how to First learn to Market yourself I wish I can actually show you guys some of these posters and stuff they're just beautiful I love that there's a YouTube video documenting the process of this person working where a video-based company so clearly understands how YouTube works oh my God I'm so impressed clearly has proven experience in Social product marketing strong understanding of digital marketing channels absolutely analytical mindset clearly showing by the numbers on the resume creative thinking problem solving skills just by how well organized this is there's just creativity oozing out of it there's like personality in this portfolio and that is absolutely what we're looking for I don't think there's anything specific in Tech or education or passion for AI but this is overall really strong for both of these applications so far they clearly demonstrate the needed qualifications and they also show that they've done things as part of the key responsibilities already and love as a product marketing specialist they're able to Market themselves right and there's a demonstration of video content which is primarily where we operate in and expanding past just like a product marketing role if you're going for software engineering data AI kind of role you also want to embody what that role is and put it within your portfolio in those cases I wouldn't care as much about the Aesthetics of things like you know you're an engineer it's okay you don't have to be that aesthetic but I would care more about these projects have you done projects that use the technologies that are required in order to build products within those the octopus rese is for screening foundational qualifications does this person have experience what is their education background things like that but the portfolio is really what brings everything to life you can say you have all these skills you've done all these things which is like great right is really great but by looking at a portfolio you can get so much more information about a person because they're able to express their projects they're able to go more in depth they're able to show their aesthetic kind of style as well I am now going to show some not so great things in people's resumes and portfolios and again I'm not trying to be mean here I really hope that this is going to help you when you're doing your applications this person has a good resume they show that they have the qualifications and they've worked different jobs in which they've demonstrated other projects that shows the key responsibilities that we're looking for as well I also appreciate for anything else you should know a part the person wrote down what it is that he thinks he's able to bring to the table however when we look at the portfolio they're clearly projects that are kind of like mock projects personal projects where they took a certain data set where they pretend to have a certain product and they're marketing it doing some analytics and things like that there's nothing like wrong about this per se but compared to the other candidates doesn't show real projects and real experience when I'm looking for a freelancer I want to see that this person has done something in freelancing like actual projects outside of their full-time job this person as well really great resume clearly shows that they have marketing experience they're being a manager they've worked at so many great companies but if you look at the portfolio again the only thing they have are things that are personal projects or things related to their job nothing outside of that if I were hiring this person full-time not a problem I would go give that interview but just given the fact that there isn't any freelance experience per se it feels like I would have to hold their hand in order to explain to them okay like this is how it is that freelancing works and just by the way I want to say like it really isn't that hard to get something on your resume and your portfolio that has to do with freelancing you can even just go to like places and just say hey can I like do this freelancing thing for you for free can I like redesign your poster can I manage your social media accounts just do that and then you would have like real experiences and you can convert them to things that are paid another thing I want to point out which doesn't sound great when I say like this but it's the honest truth for some of these people they feel very overqualified they have multiple degrees like NBA degrees they have like master's degrees two different engineering degrees worked at these like big prestigious companies and I know it sounds bad by me saying this but when I see this I'm like wow this person is going to be really great but at the same time how much is their salary expectation going to be and that is a consideration if I'm going to be honest with you so I'm not saying like don't put your degrees and accolades but if you just like look at the job posting in the company and the position that you're hiring for pretty clear that since we just say for an experience we're not saying like 10 years of experience 25 years of experience like having these like bachelor's and MERS and education degrees just know that if you're applying you may come off as being overqualified and that could be like a not great thing or it could just mean that maybe this is not the kind of side gig where like part-time job that you should be applying for maybe something that is a little bit more advanced this person for describe your experience with product marketing really love the fact that they listed things out very nicely and they also phrased it as a cover letter like hello lonely octopus War Mis regards I love that also appreciate writing something for anything else you think we should know resume wise so much great experience only comment here is that there's like so much stuff that I'm not sure where my eyes should be drawn to which again like I'm being a little bit nitpicky here because truthfully the applications started coming in for this position I am dumbfounded by how good they are this is also my first time looking through them by the way so like this is my genuine reaction I'm really surprised by the quality of applications portfolio looks great too this person has a decent resume but the formatting of it we could really work on that you're going for a product marketing position so the ability to Market yourself Aesthetics is important in this case for the portfolio I can clearly see that there's SEO marketing that's written here it is very good that they are clearly SEO specific but for this particular company in this particular role we have a heavy emphasis on content not SEO so even though they may be a great fit for another company this would be a pass a little bit of research can go a long way you can even just have duplicates of your same website and your same portfolio and then just change like what the tagline is and then highlight different projects depending on role you're applying for it's like a 5 minute 10 minute kind of change but it increases your chances of Landing a position much more all right after this step we're left with eight people in consideration along with the other eight people that directly went into the interview phase this is 16 people in total I am not going to conduct 16 interviews that are minimum 30 minutes each so I'm going to send a list of screening questions first question is what is the first thing you will do when starting this role that is what do you think will be the first project why am I asking this question well from the portfolio plus the resume I'm able to see the past experience is have a good vibe about everything but now before I actually interview someone I have to answer the kind of a little bit unfortunate kind of question is this real like do you actually have the skill sets I'm going to ask specific questions which I think that you should know if you're going to be going for this role pretty sure by the time you watch this video people would have responded to this already so I'm just going to say it in this case the first thing you should do is conduct an audit like what is the marketing funnel that's currently there what are the numbers where's the drop off so this should be the first thing and people should be able to answer that and give a justification second question what is one thing you could improve about our website this website over here I like this question because it doesn't take the candidate a lot of time they can just kind of Click through and be able to see what's up and then give like some sort of input if they truly did have experience from the things that they've done they should be able to pick out a lot of things that we can be improving right now finally we're not doing a very good job in managing our meeting Le this is absolutely true people sign up and we don't really do anything except tell them that we're launching another cohort what do you think we can provide that is of value and of entertainment between cohorts email marketing is like one of the foundations of digital marketing so they should be able to answer this question when I was hiring for an editor on Reddit similar thing I asked this series of questions U that an editor should know by the way quick tip let us not assume that the person you're talking to is a bro doesn't really matter but for some reason I Reddit people just think you're a guy so I do this a lot and when I'm hiring Engineers it would be like a quick little coding challenge or it would be something like we are trying to build this AI product what kind of LLS do you think we should be looking into for larger of companies that get a lot more applications this part they would be a lot more stringent like for Goldman Sachs I believe there were four rounds of interviews and the screening one that doesn't have a real person was like two different rounds and for meta there was think like seven rounds of interviews and the first few rounds were just coding challenges and like HR screens and things like that okay so I've just sent those screening questions to the eight people that are still in consideration hopefully they get back to us what I'm looking for is obviously to answer what would be kind of above and beyond would just be like if somebody answers using a video for example if somebody actually Illustrated what they're talking about like maybe instead of just saying like you should just change this part of a website maybe they could actually like show an illustration like what is it that we should be changing what's the reasoning behind it you know these little things can really make you s out just a little bit of effort is all it takes to elevate yourself from the rest also follow-ups do follow up especially with like smaller companies like these like somebody will be reading these don't feel like it's annoying if you're following up because like what's the worst case scenario like we think it's annoying you have nothing to lose anyway but by following up it's like oh there's enthusiasm and then you know like we're able to know that this person really cares be like rat for example our editor I think he followed up like at least seven eight times and when you get a job interview try not to call your employer a punk or a skank makes sense while we're waiting for these people to reply let's talk about the interview stage there are quite a lot of interviews that we're going to be conducting like the first eight people that remember like they literally skipped all of these steps right just directly going to the interview step because they were through networks and connections I'm thinking probably like three to four people from the applications we will be interviewing and during this interview probably just quick check to see like if they actually did things that they said they were going to do but a large part of that is just going to be a Vibe check like when you talk to someone like through VC you would have a much better understanding of The Vibes of the person does this person fit in does your personality fit in this is a really important part because you can be like the best marketing specialist best engineer ever but if you don't fit into the team that you're going to be working with that's going to be a problem finally step seven probably going to send out offers to maybe like three to four people and then we enter into the negotiation phase I don't want to make this video super long so I'm not going to talk too much in detail about negotiating because that is kind of like its own thing um quick tip especially if you're going for a part-time job like a freelance job do not be afraid to negotiate if you have zero experience then just do not negotiate you just want something but if you're someone who's had some experience like do not be afraid to negotiate you're are not going to lose a deal just because you negotiate I'm kind of like am I shooting myself in the foot here by telling you guys negotiate with me okay but in all seriousness I do want to be transparent you should negotiate and I respect people who negotiate and understand their own values and I really want to see people who I'm working with Thrive and reach their career goals and their salary goals all right that is all that I have for you guys today I hope it was helpful like actually seeing through the full process not just kind of like me giving tips I can remember in my brain but yeah let me know comments what you think about this process and how it is I'm going through these applications or if there's any other topics you want me to talk about I will see you guys in next video or live stream