5 Signs Hiring Managers Should Look For in Job Applications

If you're in charge of hiring new employees, you might find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications you receive. After looking through resume after resume, it can be hard to keep track of what you were trying to find in the first place. If you lose sight of your end goal, you run the risk of wasting your time on applicants who just aren't the right fit for the job. To maximize the use of your time and make sure you're talking to the very best candidates, look for these signs when evaluating an application:

1. Attention to Detail
While looking through applicants' resumes and cover letters, try to get a feel for how much attention they paid to the little details. Are the materials free of typos or misspellings? If it's online, have they made sure their documents are in easy-to-open formats? If they mailed the application in, did they take the opportunity to include a business card or other small detail that sets them apart? These little details shouldn't make or break your decision, but they can help you give preference to otherwise equal candidates.

2. Strong Voice
A cover letter should give you some level of insight into the applicant who wrote it. By the time you're finished reading a cover letter, you should have some sense of who the candidate is. There are some questions you can ask yourself to see if the cover letter does a good job of this:

• Do you have a sense of what motivates the applicant?
• What do you know about his or her strengths?
• What interests him or her about the role?
• What will he or she contribute to the company?

If the cover letter doesn't give you the answers to any of these questions, the applicant has done a poor job. Now, depending on your field, you might not need the applicant to be a skilled writer: Still, a meaningless cover letter indicates he or she hasn't given the application his or her all.

3. Clear Research
A sure sign that a candidate has not put much time into his or her application is a generic cover letter and resume. If you could white out your company's name and job opening from the cover letter, and the copy could work for nearly any role in the industry, set the application aside. If applicants haven't bothered to research your company, or can't figure out how their skills fit the role specifically, they're not a good fit.

4. Acknowledgement of Needs
It's not enough for your candidate to know what your company does – that's the bare minimum. Truly stellar candidates will address the needs they believe your company has, and how they will satisfy them. You're not looking for a candidate who has a clairvoyant level of insight into your business's issues: You simply want to see evidence that prospective employees have considered what you want in the role, and how they'll give it to you. As long as they're mostly on the mark, this is a good sign that they truly understand the responsibilities of the job opening.

5. Accomplishments, Not Tasks
When it comes to the applicant's work history, you should be looking for accomplishments, not tasks or duties. This is one of the tips Career Builder gives to job searchers trying to build a great resume, and for good reason. When looking for stellar candidates, it's not enough to know the day-to-day tasks they've done in the past. This information does let you know what their experience is, but it doesn't give you any insight into whether or not they were any good at it. Instead, you'll want to look for accomplishments. A strong candidate won't say he or she "entered data," but rather that he or she "improved productivity by creating workflows which made the data-entry process more efficient." This extra information lets you know when applicants recognize the importance of results: A quality you definitely want in an employee.