That was the day I had. I'd just posted an EM opening for my team. After a full day of meetings, I finally opened my messages and found 10 notifications from the hiring system. My recruiter needed my thumbs-up on a batch of resumes. I had 30 minutes before I had to leave to pick up my kids.
I had to move fast. I was backfilling a headcount my team really needed, and headcounts can disappear; who knows when the next layoff or reorg comes. So it was either get through them now, or work late into the night.
I can't speak for other hiring managers. I didn't spend 30 seconds on each resume. I didn't time them at all. I triaged in batches, based on five things.
Title
I was hiring an experienced engineering manager, so I opened the senior engineering managers first. A few directors came in too, probably overqualified, but I opened them anyway rather than miss a match. Tech leads went into a later pile, where I was looking for growth potential.
If your company's internal titles are cryptic (SRE-II), translate them. I shouldn't need your org chart to place you.
Evidence of achievement
If there was a summary, I read that first; it gives me the overview in one place. If not, straight to the latest role. I wanted outcomes, not a list of responsibilities. “Helped the team deliver X features” tells me nothing. “Increased customer CSAT by 20%” is convincing.
And don't invent them. I can tell when a metric is borrowed. Scope every number to what you actually owned: your service's p99, your team's CSAT, the migration you led. Never put a metric on the page you couldn't defend for ten minutes, because the screen is where it gets tested; that's what my notes to the recruiter are for.
No clean metrics? Scope still counts: how many engineers used it, how much traffic it served, what depended on it. Process work counts too. Cite discovery, quality, or satisfaction instead of revenue.
Domain and skill match
This was an internal platform team, and platform work has a long learning curve. If a candidate had done it before, that was a big plus. When I was hiring an engineer earlier, I looked for GCP experience because we were moving our on-prem datacenter to the cloud.
Career trajectory
I checked whether they'd held developer or technical roles before managing. This team needed a real technical foundation to shape the internal developer experience, and a manager without one was unlikely to succeed.
Titles lie. “Director of Product Engineering” tells me nothing, so I read backwards past the title into what they actually did before it. Six years of hands-on backend work before managing tells me more than any title. For this team I needed both: the technical foundation to get shortlisted, and the mindset of treating internal developers as customers to get hired.
The bar scales with seniority. For junior roles I look for trajectory instead: personal projects, craft, anything relevant you chose to build.
Location
Relocation is harder than it used to be. I didn't want to waste anyone's time, theirs or mine, on a role they couldn't move for. If the posting says remote, none of this applies.
I shortlisted fewer than five that day. For each one, I wrote the recruiter a short note: why they made it, and what to probe in the screen.
The part that still bothers me
The next morningThe next morning, five more strong candidates landed in my pipeline, and I had to go back and cut from the bottom of my triage. People I'd said yes to became no's overnight. Not because they got worse, but because there was one role and too many good people. I told the recruiter the ones I'd cut could fit other teams.
This is what hiring looks like these days. You can't control whether someone slightly stronger shows up the next morning. But you can raise your odds of surviving the triage: tailor the resume, and put your most relevant skills and achievements right at the top, so an overwhelmed manager gets your value in seconds without having to connect the dots.
Would your resume survive my triage? Run the free scan. It reads your resume against the posting the way a hiring manager would, and tells you the verdict, the gaps, and what to fix first.
This is the resume stage of the story. For what I look for once you're in the room, see what hiring managers actually look for and the common questions every interview asks; for the other side of the decision, see why you didn't get the job.