What Polling Data Tell Us About the Remote Job Market (Part 1)
Remote Work Secrets - Edition #23
What's Inside:
A look at what recruiters and hiring managers actually pay attention to when they open a resume.
A breakdown of how hiring teams think about the process.
Tips on how to structure your resume.
This Week's Remote Roles. Fully vetted remote roles for Senior Professionals.
Most career advice online is written by people who haven't hired anyone in years.
We wanted to hear from the people who actually sit on the other side of the process - the recruiters and hiring managers who are opening the resumes and deciding who gets the interview.
Over the past few months we ran a series of polls across our network, directed at recruiters and hiring managers. This is part one of two. Today we're looking at what the data revealed from the hiring side of the table. Next week we'll share what professionals actively searching for remote roles had to say. A few patterns showed up pretty quickly. Some confirmed things we already see every day when working with senior professionals. Others were a little more surprising.
What Recruiters Actually Think About Hobbies On A Resume
We asked recruiters and hiring managers a question that comes up constantly when people are updating their resumes.
Should you include interests or hobbies?
572 recruiters and hiring managers voted.
52% said yes - they like seeing them because it helps them understand the person behind the resume. 23% said hobbies are pointless and don't influence their decision at all. 17% said they only make sense if they relate to the role in some way. The remaining 7% said it depends on the industry/role.
The comments were where things got interesting. A lot of recruiters said hobbies don't usually determine whether someone gets hired, but they do help humanize a resume that might otherwise look identical to several others. When two candidates have similar experience, small details can help a hiring manager get a better sense of the person they're speaking with.
That said, no one is studying a hobbies section for five minutes. Recruiters scan resumes quickly. A short line at the bottom with a few authentic interests can work well. When someone adds a long list of activities just to fill space, it tends to have the opposite effect.
So hobbies aren't required. But in many cases they're not hurting anything either. For some recruiters, they're a small signal that there's an actual human behind the professional history.
The Resume Format Recruiters Prefer
Resume structure is another topic that creates endless debate. Everyone seems to have a slightly different opinion about the "correct" order of sections.
So we asked recruiters directly which structure they prefer when reviewing a two-to-three page resume.
234 recruiters and hiring managers responded.
45% preferred the structure: Summary, Key Skills, Experience.
42% preferred: Summary, Experience, Key Skills.
9% preferred: Summary, Education, Experience.
4% selected other formats.
The biggest takeaway here is that recruiters want orientation quickly. The vast majority expect to see a short summary at the top that explains who the candidate is and what level they operate at. After that, they want to get into either skills or experience right away.
Very few recruiters want to open a senior-level resume and scroll through education before they understand the person's background. For early-career roles that section might appear higher. But for professionals with 10–20 years of experience, hiring managers are far more interested in what you've led and what you've delivered.
The other thing this poll shows is that the difference between "skills before experience" and "experience before skills" isn't dramatic. Both formats were almost evenly split. What matters far more is clarity. Recruiters want to quickly understand your scope of leadership, your core capabilities, and the environments you've worked in.
Should You Put Your Photo On Your Resume?
This poll received the largest response out of all the questions we asked.
1,390 recruiters and hiring managers weighed in on whether candidates should include a photo on their resume.
The results were overwhelmingly clear. 82% said no. 13% said yes. The remaining 5% said it depends.
In North America and the UK, photos on resumes still make many recruiters uncomfortable because they introduce bias concerns. Hiring teams are often trained to avoid anything that could influence a decision based on appearance, age, or background. A photo on the resume can unintentionally introduce those factors before a candidate has even been evaluated on their experience.
In other parts of the world, particularly parts of Europe or Asia, resume photos are more common. But for professionals targeting remote roles with US-based companies, leaving the photo off the resume is still the safest option.
Your LinkedIn profile already contains your photo. Recruiters who want to see it will find it within seconds anyway.
Are Recruiters Using AI To Screen Resumes?
There's a lot of noise online about artificial intelligence screening every resume before a human ever sees it. That idea has spread quickly across social media, and many job seekers now assume that every application is filtered by some kind of AI system.
We wanted to test that assumption.
198 recruiters and hiring managers responded when we asked whether they're currently using AI to screen resumes.
24% said yes. 76% said no.
That doesn't mean technology isn't involved in the process. Most companies still rely on applicant tracking systems to store resumes and organize applications. But those systems are usually acting more like databases than decision-making tools.
In many organizations, a recruiter still opens the resume first and makes the initial judgment about whether someone fits the role. AI screening does exist in some environments, but it's far from universal. The reality is a lot less automated than people assume.
This Week's Remote Jobs
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Final Thoughts
The picture that comes out of these polls is pretty consistent. Hiring teams are scanning quickly, making fast judgments on structure and clarity, and most of them are still the first human eyes on your resume, not an AI.
For senior professionals, the challenge usually isn't capability. It's how that experience is positioned for a remote market and how clearly it communicates the right things in the first few seconds of a recruiter's review. Small shifts there can change the speed of the entire search.
If you're in the middle of a remote job search and things feel slower or more frustrating than they should, that's usually the place to start looking. We spend a lot of time helping senior leaders step back, look at their positioning, and identify what might be holding the process up. If you want a second set of eyes on your situation, you can schedule a strategy call with our team and we'll walk through it together.
Next week we'll bring you part two, where we share what professionals on the other side of the process told us. How long searches are actually taking, how people are landing roles, and what the experience of navigating the remote market really looks like right now. So keep an eye open!
Stay Rebellious,
Michelle & The RR Team