ResumeWorld
Screening guide
IT resumes carry the longest certification lists in hiring, and certifications are the weakest predictor on them. What separates a strong infrastructure hire is what they did when something was down: whether they owned the incident, found the cause, and changed something so it did not recur. That is the signal a rubric for this function needs to weight above the acronym list.
Signal
Being on the bridge call versus running it. Look for cause found and change made.
Endpoint counts, sites, cloud versus on-premise. These change the job substantially.
Someone who scripted away recurring work is describing a different capability from someone who performed it reliably.
Relevant and current ones are a floor signal. Volume of them is not a ranking signal.
Patch management, access control and incident response experience, weighted to your risk profile.
Noise
None of these is disqualifying on its own. Each is a reason to ask a question rather than assume an answer.
Certification list longer than the experience section
Tooling named with no description of the environment it ran in
No incident or outage described anywhere in an infrastructure history
Support role described entirely as ticket volume
Rubric
Write the criteria down before you look at anyone. An undocumented standard drifts, and it cannot be audited afterwards.
Comparable scale, topology and cloud/on-premise mix.
Evidence of owning an incident through to a durable fix.
Scripting or tooling built to remove recurring manual work.
The specific certifications the role requires, in date.
Experience with the controls regime your environment operates under.
Next step
Ask the same ones of every candidate. Comparability is the whole point.
FAQ
Put it into practice
Work through hundreds of applications per role without the rubric drifting between the first resume and the last.
ExploreScore every application against the role you are actually hiring for, then get a ranked shortlist with the reasoning attached.
ExploreGet a competency signal with the application instead of discovering the gap in the second interview.
ExploreOther roles
The certification list is long and the tool list is longer. Look for what the candidate found, fixed or stopped.
Read the guideSeparating engineers who shipped something from engineers who were nearby when something shipped.
Read the guideHigh-volume applicant pools where the differentiating signal is judgement, not tooling.
Read the guideGo deeper
Where to put certifications on a resume, how to format them, what to do about expired or in-progress ones, and which are worth listing at all.
Read the guideHow to screen hundreds of applications for one role without quality drifting: write criteria first, split the work, use bands, and sample what you reject.
Read the guidePhone screen interview questions grouped by purpose, what a good answer sounds like, red flags worth probing, and a simple 25-minute structure with scoring.
Read the guideDefine the criteria once, screen every application against them, and get a ranked shortlist with the reasoning attached.