Вікторія Горбік Work 6 February 2025, 09:00

“The recruiter is not the enemy.” Why hiring specialists sometimes don’t read resumes (or so candidates think) and ask questions whose answers are already given

Sometimes, after an interview with recruiters, candidates feel that the hiring specialist did not even prepare for the interview, in particular, did not read the resume, because he asks about education and experience, although all this was described in the document. Independent Creative Director, Andriy Nysynets, told a story about a similar situation. During the interview, which he recalls, the specialist had the impression that the recruiter did not even prepare for the meeting.

dev.ua became curious about why recruiters need to re-question the information provided, and we also learned from recruitment specialists how they work with resumes and what criteria they use to select candidates' CVs. It turns out that there are some non-obvious points in this process.

The most important thing in a resume

When starting a conversation about recruiters and candidate resumes, hiring specialists mostly emphasize that they do not themselves come up with the criteria to apply when selecting future employees.

«A recruiter is someone who executes an order to find a specific specialist. This should always be remembered,» emphasizes Maria Samoiluk, IT recruiter at Upwork.

The specialist noted that the recruiter has a job description and specific requirements from the customer for whom he is looking for an employee. Accordingly, when the recruiter opens the candidate’s resume, he compares it with specific criteria.

The average statistical job description, as summarized by Maria Samoiluk, contains the following requirements:

Requirement for the number of years of experience. Therefore, it is useful to indicate your total number of years in the first sentence in the Summary section of your resume so as not to test the recruiter’s mathematical abilities. Yes, he may make a mistake that is not in your favor. This is especially useful because you can independently emphasize what is beneficial to you. For example: I have 10+ years of experience in software development, of which 5 years with «such and such» technologies (or in the position of Team lead).
Requirement for the areas / domains / types of products / industries with which you have worked. If it is important for the company that you have experience in fintech, and you have it, then it is useful to write it at the top in the Summary. And draw the recruiter’s attention to this.
Requirement for certain skills. The Skills section is perhaps the most important section in your resume for a recruiter. This is the section that he can look at first. Because this section contains the keywords that will be used to search for you. It doesn’t matter how much you want to work, what matters is whether you can. Therefore, when writing a resume, you need to pay special attention to this section: make it structured, easy to visually perceive, complete. So that the recruiter can find everything he is interested in there in a matter of seconds.
Education requirement. Yes, in Ukraine, the attitude towards education is twofold. Often, higher education is discredited, so candidates can write it somewhere at the very end of the resume, or not indicate it at all if it is not specialized. But for serious positions and abroad, the education requirement is often very strict. Therefore, this section should not be neglected. It should also be written concisely, but meaningfully. If the education is not specialized, it is worth mentioning several additional courses or certifications that will confirm theoretical knowledge in the field, as well as show a desire for self-development.

“It is only after the skills match with the must-have technologies in the vacancy that you can move on.” What automated systems do recruiters use to work and process resumes?

How recruiters rank resumes

All received resumes are processed and divided by recruiters according to the criteria in the job description. As Maria Samoiluk notes, a candidate’s resume for a recruitment specialist is visually divided into 2 parts:

The part for the recruiter is where they collect all the answers to the recruiter’s questions, which he forms from the job description he has.
The part for the next manager is the experience section — where there are details of positions and completed projects. The manager pays the most attention to this section, as the recruiter sends him resumes already selected by number of years of experience, by areas/domains/types of products/skills/education.

«This doesn’t mean that the recruiter doesn’t read the experience, but often the recruiter can look at it superficially,» the specialist adds.

In particular, according to Maria, the recruiter first looks at the document to:

Find out if the candidate has changed jobs often.
Did the candidate have any questionable companies in his/her experience?
There were no breaks in the experience.
Do the positions held correspond to the title of the resume and the position for which the candidate is applying?

A hiring specialist can also go over the content of projects and functionality, but this will often be superficial.

“The future is definitely in artificial intelligence.” Recruiters told how to better use AI for resume writing and interviewing

Why recruiters ask what is on the resume

Candidates often complain that recruiters ask everything on their resume during an interview. Some candidates accuse hiring managers of not preparing for the interview.

We at dev.ua decided to give the recruiter a chance to explain why they ask what is written in the resume, and why you shouldn’t say: «You have my resume. Haven’t you read it? Ask specific questions, I’ll answer.» Here are the experts' arguments:

To see and hear a self-presentation. Maria Samoiluk emphasizes the importance for candidates to prepare a speech about themselves for a couple of minutes, so that the recruiter can assess the person’s personal qualities, behavior and temperament, understand whether they will fit into the team and whether they will work well with the manager. «In essence, this is a retelling of your story, a review of your skills and a review of several successful projects that you can juggle at the interview and talk about those that are more relevant to the company’s needs,» the specialist notes and advises being ready to repeat this speech at the second, and if necessary, at the third interview.
Due to lack of time. Iryna Chesnokova, HR BP at MeGaDev OU, reports that sometimes a sourcer may first communicate with a candidate, for example, and then pass it on to a recruiter, and a hiring specialist who has a fifteen-minute session with candidates may not physically have time to prepare and thoroughly study the resume.
If the recruiter has doubts about the veracity of the resume. In this case, as Maria Samoiluk notes, the specialist may ask the candidate to repeat some sections and ask for details that have already been provided.

“Her questions were more and more like improvisation. By the end, I didn’t even feel like I was being evaluated as a specialist.” The creative person told about a messy interview for which the recruiter was not prepared. It turns out that there are many such situations. Why?

About truth and doubts

Let’s take a closer look at the previous thesis. Some job search experts also confirm that recruiters intentionally ask for information that has already been provided in order to identify and weed out people who often write unrealistic information. Not all hiring experts agree with this.

Iryna Chesnokova reports that a recruiter can ask questions that are answered in the resume if he has any doubts.

«For example, in a situation where a candidate wrote one thing on their resume, but says something completely different, to find out whether the candidate really knows, can, and practices it,» she explains.

Iryna personally encountered a similar situation when a person turned to a career consultant to write a resume for a candidate, but the candidate did not prepare for the interview and was unable to answer the questions. In this case, this undermined the trust in the specialist who was applying for the job, and the offer was not made to him.

Tech Recruiter Taras Popovych is not 100% sure about this approach. According to him, duplicating questions from resumes helps the recruiter notice false information and identify those who may try to advance to the next stage by providing embellished or false information. However, the specialist believes that this approach is not optimal.

«This can create unnecessary difficulties for candidates who do have experience but can’t always accurately recall every moment or detail listed on their resume (due to excitement or just plain confusion/forgetfulness),» explains Tech Recruiter.

Taras Popovych believes that false information about a candidate’s technical skills can be identified by asking about information from the resume, but this approach is more often used when working with Junior positions.

But in reality, what else can a recruiter ask, if not what the candidate himself indicated in the resume? This is exactly the question asked by Natalia Klimenko, Co-Founder at Codica. The HR director does not agree that duplicate questions can only be used to detect lies. It is important for a recruiter to understand the details, explains Natalia Klimenko, and a resume often contains only basic information.

«The recruiter’s main goal is to find the perfect match between the candidate and the company, not to catch someone in a lie,» notes the HR director.

In addition, she emphasizes that not all recruiters have a technical education and may, unfortunately, not immediately see if a candidate has «lied» about technical skills.

"Before the interview, the candidate refused to turn on the camera and immediately sent a video generated with the help of AI." The candidate with an AI business card tried to convince the recruiter in English that he was a native Ukrainian. And there are many of them: how do recruiters filter this?

Life hacks on how to spot a lying candidate

Every experienced hiring specialist has their own tricks and «recipes» for how to spot a dishonest applicant. Recruiters shared some of them today.

To check how deeply a person has worked and whether they have worked at all with the technologies indicated in the resume, Taras Popovych believes that a hiring specialist should:

Ask very basic technical questions (but even here you need an understanding of technical terms, and this only comes with experience).
After, for example, prescreening, pass on the answers to the technical team, who in turn can provide more specific feedback.

For example, among the questions that Tech Recruiter himself asks are:

«Tell us about your experience developing a project architecture from scratch, what your role was, or what tools you used to build and optimize data pipelines.»

Natalia Klimenko believes that lies can also be detected in various ways:

test tasks,
technical cases at the interview or even during the probationary period.

«A recruiter is definitely not an enemy looking for liars, but rather an ally. I always advise candidates to prepare for the interview, answer questions honestly, and not list skills in their resume that they don’t actually have, then there will be no need to lie,» says the HR director.

To find out whether a candidate is lying or not, Alyona Kashchuk, Lead of Recruitment at FlowJobs, says it’s worth asking closed questions, the answers to which will be deliberately simple. «Answers like ‘yes’ or ‘no’ won’t tell me anything. It’s too primitive and gives little information about the candidate,» she explains.

The recruiter gives the following example:

You shouldn’t ask: «Have you worked with Node.js?», especially when it is stated in the resume in the «Programming Languages» block.
It’s better to say: «Please tell us more about the project (s) where you used Node.js.»

«That’s when you can really determine how relevant a candidate is, and this makes it possible to assess how much a person understands what they’re talking about,» adds Alena Kashchuk.

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