What I look for in a candidate the second I open their resume

I read between fifty and a hundred resumes in a typical week.

Most senior recruiters won't tell you what they're actually doing in the first sixty seconds. I will, partly because I think the process should be more transparent, and partly because the candidates I want to find are the ones who already understand what I'm reading for.

Here's the order I scan in, what I'm looking for, and what I ignore.

The first thing I read isn't the headline

I scroll past the photo, the title, the personal statement, and the "core competencies" block. None of that tells me whether the person can do the job.

The first thing I look at is the employment history block, specifically the shape of it. I'm looking at three things at once:

• Tenure. How long did they stay at each company?

• Progression. Were they promoted inside companies, or only between them?

• Coherence. Does the career sit inside one or two industries, or does it bounce?

That's a six-second scan. It tells me 70% of what I need to know about whether to keep reading.

What tenure actually tells me

In US food manufacturing operations, the hard work happens in years three to seven of any job.

Years one and two are honeymoon, you can show up, fix the obvious problems, and look like a hero. Year three is when the easy wins have been spent and the structural problems become yours. Year four is when you've owned a full annual cycle including peak season, audit cycle, and a real budget. Years five to seven are when you've developed a bench and earned the right to inherit the bigger seat above you.

A resume with three eighteen-month stints at three plants tells me the candidate has only seen years one and two of operations leadership. Three times. That's not "diverse experience", that's the same year repeated.

A resume with two five-year stints tells me a different story. Even if they're more junior on paper, they've owned the hard work.

The rough rule: if more than half a senior candidate's roles are under two years, I want to know why before I bring them forward.

Promotion from within is the loudest signal

When someone is promoted from within a company, two things happened. Their peers, who watched them work daily, voted for them. And their boss took on the political cost of advocating for them. Neither happens for the wrong people often.

When a senior leader has been promoted at every step inside two or three companies, that's a much stronger signal than a resume full of bigger and bigger titles at six different employers.

The candidates I work hardest to engage are the ones who got promoted three times in one place and then moved.

Industry coherence, and the exception that matters

Food manufacturing operations is its own discipline. I've written about this before. Twenty years inside food beats fifteen years split across automotive, CPG, and industrial.

The exception worth noting: candidates who started in food manufacturing, spent some time elsewhere, and came back are often interesting. They bring outside perspective on continuous improvement, capex execution, or commercial commercial mindset without having lost the food fundamentals. The ones who only ever did food sometimes lack a frame of reference for what's possible.

What I'm not doing is treating a single non-food role mid-career as a disqualifier.

After the shape, the quantified outcomes

Once the shape of the career passes the scan, I'm looking for specifics inside the role descriptions.

This sounds obvious. It isn't, because most resumes don't do it.

The wrong way looks like this: "Drove operational excellence across the network, leveraging cross-functional partnerships to deliver step-change improvements in plant performance."

That's a sentence written by someone who doesn't want to be measured on what they actually did.

The right way looks like this: "Owned $48M capex programme across three plants; OEE up nine points in eighteen months; led FDA inspection response with zero major findings."

That sentence tells me what they were responsible for, what the result was, and what the operating environment looked like. I can verify any of it. The first sentence I cannot.

Senior candidates who write in adjectives instead of numbers are usually doing it because the numbers wouldn't flatter them. I've stopped giving the benefit of the doubt there.

What I ignore (mostly)

A few things I genuinely don't weight in the first scan:

• Certifications listed at the top. Lean, Six Sigma, PCQI, HACCP Lead Instructor, these matter for the role but they're table stakes. Putting them above your experience tells me you want me to weight them, which makes me wonder why.

• The personal statement. Almost always written for everyone and for no one. I'll read it on a second pass if the rest of the resume earns it.

• Education. It matters at entry-level. By VP level, it has almost no predictive value. I'll glance to make sure there's something credible, but I'm not weighting MBAs against engineering degrees against twenty years of plant floor at this stage.

• Length. Two pages or six pages, I don't care, as long as the substance is there. Length isn't a signal either way.

Red flags

A few patterns make me cautious before I've even called the candidate:

• "Interim" titles for more than a year. Sometimes legitimate (a real interim assignment between substantive roles). Often a politely-described demotion or off-ramp.

• Gaps that aren't explained. I'm not opposed to gaps. I'm opposed to unexplained ones, because they suggest the candidate didn't want to discuss them, which is a much bigger red flag than whatever the reason was.

• A pattern of "first 90 days" claims at every role. A senior leader who turned around a plant in 90 days at three consecutive companies is either a remarkable operator or someone whose self-description and reality have parted ways.

• Title inflation in small businesses. "VP of Operations" at a $40M business is operationally a strong Plant Director elsewhere. Not a disqualifier, but the gap between the title and the actual scope is something to test in interview.

Green flags

The signals that make me move a resume to the "call this person" pile fast:

• A career that stays in food manufacturing through industry cycles.

• Promotion-from-within at the previous one or two employers.

• Quantified outcomes that include both the result and the operating context.

• Named technologies, named plants, named customers, proof of plant-level specificity.

• A clear line from one role to the next that I could narrate back to them in a sentence.

That last one matters more than the rest combined. If I can't tell a coherent story about why this person took the roles in the order they took them, the candidate hasn't been intentional about their career. That predicts how they'll be intentional about yours.

If you're a hiring manager evaluating shortlisted candidates and you'd like an outside read on the resumes, that's the kind of work I do every week. Easiest way to start a conversation: williams-recruitment.com/contact, or scott@williams-recruitment.com.

If you're a candidate reading this, keep your resume's first page truthful, specific, and quantified, and you'll do well in front of anyone who matters.