17 ms·

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those

by beat 9y ago

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - managers and senior/lead tech staff, for engineering jobs. Considering pg's maximum about maker schedules, the hiring process is very disruptive for the productivity of some of your most valuable tech staff. So you want to get rid of 19 resumes out of 20, without ever interviewing them. And for that, you need heuristics. And those heuristics are, in all likelihood, going to be biased and stupid in some ways. For example, I will automatically reject any resume that has more than two typos. I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. The danger is that a heuristic - any heuristic - for filtering out resumes will inevitably lead to missing some candidates who would excel in the role. Oh well. I'm not going to waste time interviewing every possible candidate, just hoping to catch that magic person. It's irresponsible.

digitalsushi 9y ago
i overheard this in an elevator, "our HR department tosses the bottom half of resumes in the pile into the trash because we refuse to hire unlucky people"
- volkk 9y ago
  ha. except perhaps they're the unlucky ones because they chucked out a great engineers resume and the engineer is actually the lucky one ;)
  - cwbrandsma 9y ago
    or, "the lucky engineers had their resumes tossed in the trash so they didn't have to waist their time at that company"
    - volkk 9y ago
      that's what i was implying
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  And recruiters and managers wonder why applicants spam hundreds of cookie cutter resumes and cover letters instead of painstakingly crafting each one. Or why they get annoyed at 'job portal' applications where we have to retype our resume into the various little text boxes the web application provides. Its just a numbers game if you don't have a relationship with someone who can get you a new job. > refuse to hire unlucky people Not getting hired there seems to be the 'lucky' move. Arbitrary hiring guarantees, over time, some pretty terrible characters that a proper hiring process would filter out. If you're pissing away 50% of your potential and, say, there's a 20% chance of getting a 'good' person, now there's a 10% chance of that. Over time, a place with such hiring standards would most likely build out a corporate culture that's subpar. The rare 'good' hires would probably take off much earlier than need be because there's so many more 'bad' hires. Eventually the 'bad' hires rule the roost and then people act surprised at gross incompetence as the norm in many companies, shameless dishonesty, and various forms of harassment being normalized. I worked at a place that didn't take hiring very seriously and this is exactly what ended up happening.
  - spenczar5 9y ago
    It's a joke from the British version of the Office.
    - drzaiusapelord 9y ago
      Poe's Law I suppose.
  - Majora320 9y ago
    Except that isn't how statistics work. If you have 100 applications, 20% of which are good, and drop 50% of them, you get 50 applications, but you still have the 20% good application/bad application rate. Of course, you still get 50% less total good applications, but ratios != total.
    - drzaiusapelord 9y ago
      If there are 10 'good' hires in the initial pile, then cutting out 5 arbitrarily lowers your chance of getting any one of those 10 by half instantly. This is what I was trying to express. At the end of the day there are only so many 'good' applicants.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  Perhaps, don't take it too literally. I suspect that comment must have been out of desperation, a satirical comment meant to criticize their woefully inadequate hiring process.
  - HarryHirsch 9y ago
    From what I've seen in academia, this is a surprisingly adequate process. I've seen them do phone interviews, Skype interviews, divinations, psychometrical testings, on-sites - and then none of their unicorns is right colour. The commitee declares a failed search and tries again the following semester. You'd think that many, if not most of the people in the applicant pile could do an adequate job, perhaps with some training, considering what the job market looks like in the life sciences. Instead they play precious and then they have to make do with some last-minute lecturer, and that at times plays out really bad.
- gknoy 9y ago
  You joke, but this is very similar to the Secretary Problem's optimal solution [0] [1]: > The optimal cutoff tends to n/e as n increases, and the best applicant is selected with probability 1/e. So, you deliberately reject a first cohort of applicants, and then pick the first person you encounter that's better than the best one you rejected. Obviously, in the joke that's not possible as they are neglecting to interview them, so I think the sibling comments are correct about it being a skewering of the hiring process, but it's neat that there's such a close parallel. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15567307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15567307
- user5994461 9y ago
  Have you ever seen a pile of one thousand resumes that you have to go through? I will give you a tip. You can't read them all. Don't even bother trying.
  - pellucide 9y ago
    If you get a thousand resumes for a few jobs, then reading/analyzing/grading resumes are useless indicator of talent. You have to resort to some other process.
- finiter 9y ago
  Related: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people.html http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unluc... And HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134
Blazespinnaker 9y ago
no, your filtering mechanism is irresponsible. I'd recommend relying less on resumes and more on referrals from a trusted network.
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  Trusted network is even worse for bias; at least from my experience with shops that have tried both. It's how you kill diversity, arrest your growth, and let fallow the connections to recruiting pipelines that might help you escape once you realize how deep you've gotten.
  - jacurtis 9y ago
    Exactly, i argue that trusted networks are the easiest way to build bias in a company, kill diversity, and establish an echo chamber.
    - daniel_reetz 9y ago
      You also tend to reconstruct failed teams. I've worked at places where people hired all their old friends who (collectively) failed to deliver on the last big promise, or executed poorly. You end up spending your referral bonus money on rebuilding cliques and their biases toward failure.
- jasonpeacock 9y ago
  Now you're promoting "who you know", which is irresponsible as it can pass up many qualified candidates who don't happen to be in the same circles as you. Does "trusted network" mean alumni clubs? Church groups? Gym friends? What would be an un-biased trusted network to filter candidates with?
  - drzaiusapelord 9y ago
    > Church groups? Now you have a defacto "If you're not in the boss's religion or congregation you can just piss right off" thing going on which is toxic for the workplace. Even if you were, say the same Christian denomination as him, are you willing to drive to the boss's wealthy suburb to go to the wealthy suburban church every Sunday solely for your career? Nothing says the organization doesn't care about merit or diversity than church hiring.
rdiddly 9y ago
So optimizing for making resumes go away, and resigning yourself to shouldering the long-term burdens the article describes. That's what you're describing and that's certainly one way to do it.
afpx 9y ago
First, there may not be a tech shortage if teams are “weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles....” But, if there is, I’m assuming that candidates are just applying randomly to any positions that are available. The ‘Tinder’ strategy is probably a good one if the goal is to maximize earnings. However, if one is a ‘5’ it makes sense to spam all of the positions. But, if one is a ‘10’, it makes sense to avoid interviewing all together because there is diminishing returns: too much work for too little potential gain. So, the other question is if the hiring process is so ineffective, why aren’t companies innovating? There must be lack of competition in the market if companies are willing to wait several months and spend thousands of dollars to fill a role while also missing out on the best candidates.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  > I’m assuming that candidates are just applying randomly to any positions that are available Yep, that's it. The same cost-benefits dynamics as spam mail.
- psadri 9y ago
  I think google did a good job of this in the early days. They got the word out on the street that their interviews were notoriously difficult. That probably dissuaded a lot of the random applicants. I also read somewhere that some big bank (Goldman) just has a very circuitous, lengthy application process and the main point of it is to weed out the spray and pray applicants.
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    i’m pretty certain google is the most applied to company in the world so not sure if that holds up
    - tzakrajs 9y ago
      It helps to keep the illusion of exclusivity the more people you turn away.
    - 9y ago
Gargoyle 9y ago
This is fine if it's how you want to handle it, but you can not ever complain about a shortage of qualified candidates.
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
If you're going to filter on typos, you may as well put a hackerrank/leetcode question as the initial filter, or invent your own question. That will save you and your team more time since you will only get respondents that pass and you don't need to review every resume yourself for typos.
- pklausler 9y ago
  I don't know about the original poster, but I'll immediately spot every error in spelling, punctuation, and usage in a ten-second skim of a page. My eyes just go right to them. And yes, I consider that it's difficult to write correct English. But if you're willing to send out an erroneous resume without getting it competently reviewed, I have to suspect the depth of your commitment to quality overall.
  - pizza234 9y ago
    > And yes, I consider that it's difficult to write correct English. But if you're willing to send out an erroneous resume without getting it competently reviewed, I have to suspect the depth of your commitment to quality overall. Is this theory or practice? People who individually craft CVs and cover letters (I do) go through a very resource consuming process. Having all the CVs and cover letters externally reviewed makes the process even more resource consuming. It's crucial to differentiate spell-checking from proofreading. The parent specified spell-checking; there is a reason to be strict on this, and it's that spell-checking a document takes less than a minute with a word processor, so one really needs to be careless to leave more than a couple of spelling mistakes. Proofreading on the other hand, is much more demanding (finding people, coordinating, reviewing and applying changes), and often, gives feedback that may not be very useful or even conflictual between reviewers. I don't think proofreading for more than a handful of CVs/CLs is realistic (expect for the CV-maniacs).
    - pklausler 9y ago
      You meant "except".
  - 9y ago
wanderingbort 9y ago
> It's irresponsible. While I agree, it would be irresponsible to exhaustively interview isn't a key metric for a _good_ hiring process how efficiently you can find/place candidates who _do_ excel in the role? By that turn, shouldn't a responsible hiring manager constantly be evaluating and improving their heuristics so that their front-line filtering is less biased and stupid in the ways that materially affect the quality of hires? I don't think the point is that we can remove heuristic filtering from the process. Heuristics are necessary in hiring but this doesn't justify being dismissive of a discussion about whether a certain class of heuristics is really serving the needs of the organization.
static_noise 9y ago
People learn about and optimize for those heuristics. Those resumes will on average get better and better over time until half of them are almost perfect. Those people all spent considerable time and energy on optimizing their resume. You get people who look good on paper. They will continue to excel in your company (on paper). If your job is to look good on paper. Yes, go on.
- HeavyStorm 9y ago
  You should at least look good on paper. I'll not hire you because you have a wonderful resume, but I'll interview you. And I'll not interview you if your resume looks bad. (truth be said, I'm not the one selecting resumes right now, and sometimes I get garbage that I wouldn't even interview)
  - monocasa 9y ago
    I think it's fair to keep in mind that the developers you want don't have a lot of experience interviewing (they tend to get snatched up as soon as they're on the market, if not before), and the ones you definitely don't want might have more experience interviewing than doing their actual job.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  To be perfectly honest, I can't see proofreading your resume to be that big of a burden. And if you can't bother to do that, what else can't you bother to do while on the job?
gwbas1c 9y ago
Yes, but: Being hand-delivered a resume from a trusted colleague is a filtering mechanism. It won't guarantee a phone call, but it's a better recommendation than a recruiter trying to gain a commission on this week's "really awesome superstar."
- beat 9y ago
  A hand-delivered resume from someone I trust is almost guaranteed an interview, regardless of typos!
einarfd 9y ago
> I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. Getting someone to look over your stuff and looking for spelling errors sounds like a simple and easy fix doesn’t it? But in my experience that doesn't work as well as one would think, prof reading is a lot harder than it looks. After all it's isn't enough to catch some of the errors, you need to catch them all. As someone that has close family members with dyslexia, and have struggled with spelling all my life. I have to say that seeing those challenges characterised as carelessness is infuriating. For a lot of people getting spelling right is easy, and that is great. But for some of us it is not, while prof reading and spell checkers might help, they are not a magical fix all. Some errors often sneak through, no matter what you do.
- jgust 9y ago
  Did you misspell prof(sic) to make a point, or was that a happy accident?
  - stult 9y ago
    The prof is in the pudding.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      Speaking of correctness... This has always bothered me because I grew up understanding the correct phrase to be "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" and assumed that the shorter form arose because of people who simply didn't know what it really meant. So I googled it and it turns out that the short form, "the proof is in the pudding," has been around since the 1920's (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_the_eating https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_proof_of_the_pudding_is_i...). So, it's got some legs! I still don't think the short form makes any sense, but at least it's not a recent phenomenon caused by clueless hipsters :-)
      - gnopgnip 9y ago
tlogan 9y ago
I 100% understand and I was doing the same. Your approach is ctually the problem. Hiring should be very very important - maybe even the top priority. The two most important things in the company should be: hiring and sales. In that respect, you need to invest into hiring in same was as you invest into sales. For example, sales have much much better heuristics algorithms while hiring is all about weird and random rules.
- tormeh 9y ago
  Hiring is the most important thing a company ever does. Bad hiring means you'll get a bad company. In the US you can partly balance this by firing diligently, but that has its own problems. Tech staff shouldn't waste their time in hopeless cases, but assuming your applicants aren't all about the same the return on hiring the best one could be huge.
watwut 9y ago
If you are so flooded by resumes, you really should be more specific in your job ad. By that, I mean you should describe the position you look to fill I details, including uncomfortable parts. People will self select way more. As is now, many job ads work as something attempting to sell position - but you are flooded by people you don't want (else you would just pick 5 random to interview).
- beat 9y ago
  When I've been in this situation, I wasn't the one making the job description. In general, I feel the hiring process focuses on the wrong things. Buzzword compliance is a major problem. Experience in problem spaces is much harder to capture in a resume than a list of technologies that can be software-grepped for the benefit of technically clueless recruiters and HR. Similarly, I'm not a fan of most technical reviews. They tend to focus on gotcha questions and think-on-your-feet trivial programming exercises that have virtually no bearing on real life as an engineer. To be fair, they can help, but they often exclude excellent engineers who aren't as good at the on-your-feet game as they are at the big picture game. When interviewing candidates, I tend to pick up on an interesting experience on their resume, and ask them to talk about it. What went right? What went wrong? What was your role in the solution? Heuristic: Candidates who blame others for failures, especially when they don't praise others for success, get a big black mark. I don't usually like working with people who are looking for someone to blame, regardless of their skill. Heuristic: When someone starts talking about some project and really geeks out about it, getting into the details of how the solution worked and why it delighted them, gets a huge plus. First, it means they were actually at the core and understood what was going on. Second, it says what they care about. Sometimes, I'll get them talking about their best experiences as an engineer, or their worst, just to hear the geek come out. It's very telling. And I have usually decided on a candidate in the first five to ten minutes of an interview. If it's no, it's no. If it's yes, the rest of the interview is mostly about validating my initial impression.
  - watwut 9y ago
    I think that asking overly hard technical questions is bad for reasons you said, but if an engineer gets offended over simple "implement linked list" or other basic exercise, something is wrong with that engineer. Either it is that he/she masks some lack of basic knowledge or he/she is too much of primadona. It is perfectly ok for interviewer to check on basic skills, since all interviewer goes by is what you say about yourself. But, if I had enough social skills to tone down "geeking" withing 10 minutes of interview with stranger, you would not hire me? That is just side note through. The older I am, the less I like to frame myself as "geek", there are some cultural aspects I have grown to dislike. A lot of "geekinesss" is actually trying to be cool rather then anything else.
zentiggr 9y ago
Honest question - how does this relate to some of the anecdotes in the OP - where someone referred to recruiter/HR as a desirable hire by a current employee gets denied because <some clueless resume scan criteria fail>? That's the real kicker in the whole article... when "We want this person!" doesn't work because crustimoney proseedcake.
- beat 9y ago
  I'm trying to explain why heuristics start getting applied in the first place.
oldandtired 9y ago
I don't want to be too critical, but you have a number of grammatical errors in your comment. I believe this shows how easy it can be to get at least 2 typographical errors in even a short piece of communication. I am sure that this comment will infringe on someone's standard.
- wooter 9y ago
  really? you don't think its evidence that we invest varying levels of effort into things we care about? thusly, a candidate with typographical errors is closer internet-comment-level interested effort-wise in the position.
  - oldandtired 9y ago
    Claiming something is easy to do and then making the same errors simply diminished the strength of the argument presented. The comment comes across as "do as I say, not do as I do."
    - intro-b 9y ago
      it's fun for text-based debate, but aren't you just ignoring the greater contextual situation for the sake of argument? the distance between anonymous internet comments and professional discourse is wider than what you're implying
      - oldandtired 9y ago
        Why should the distance between between anonymous internet comments and professional discourse be wide? If your comment is about professional matters then you should have enough professionalism to make you point appropriately.
        intro-b 9y ago
        i mean, from my understanding of the english language, these kinds of things are usually contextual based on the medium, not the content of the message. i suppose everyone has their different interpretations, though
Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
"Let me randomly filter these and hope for the best" is the essence of your suggestion for screening candidates. It doesn't sound very good. It sounds like you should be investing more time into interviewing more people instead of throwing away folks who could excel, but fail an arbitrary heuristic. That is to say, instead of throwing away 19 out of 20... don't throw away so many. Obviously you don't need to call in all 20 people, that would be a huge waste of time. But your approach seems too sensitive to the heuristic for the tradeoff of saving a few hours of time to find a person whom you'd hopefully employ for years. I wouldn't take that decision lightly, especially with a small company, though I suppose you can always let them go if it doesn't work out.
- beat 9y ago
  The thing is, it's not "random". I have a good reason for my filter - it represents attention to detail. And yes, it will exclude the occasional good candidate, but it will exclude far more bad candidates. If I have 100 resumes for two roles, and I can, through heuristics, knock it down to five, then I'm starting with enough "good" resumes to stand at least a chance of filling the two roles. Mind you, we're now about a day's worth of work for a manager, and five interrupted afternoons for the senior/lead engineers doing the interviews. On top of that, the good candidates are going to have other companies competing for them. If my response is "Well, we like this candidate, but let's spend two weeks interviewing another twenty people, just to be sure", my odds of missing the good candidate are pretty high.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
Why is that people don't run a spellcheck? It's rare for me to see even official internal documents without several spelling mistakes even after they have been approved for publication. Just turning on the spelling checker in your favourite word processor, editor, or even web browser will go a long way toward catching most typos. The grammar checker in Word is also worth a try. Did you mean "P. G.'s maxim" when you typed "pg's maximum"? :-)
- ghaff 9y ago
  As someone who does a huge amount of writing, it's always surprising how many errors still end up slipping through even though I do at least one re-read when I write something. It's basically impossible to do a good proof-reading job on your own work, especially if it's something you've gone through and reworked multiple times like (presumably) a resume.
- beat 9y ago
  I noticed that even these little HN checkboxes have a grammar checker. Earlier, I carelessly wrote "the the", and it underlined the second "the" as incorrect. And yet, the comments in response to my OP are full of easily detected errors. It's like you have to make an effort to screw it up.
  - T-hawk 9y ago
    That's your browser doing the checking, not anything that's part of the HN page.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  In my experience, spellcheck leaves a lot to be desired. Even on a finished document that I've manually verified as being perfect in terms of spelling and grammar, there's usually still a sea of red and green underlines offering incoherent suggestions in English as dictated by Google Translate. If the authors of the documents you mention are anything like me, we're so used to ignoring false positives that the net result now permits minor errors to slip through.
js2 9y ago
About that heuristic, when hiring for sysadmins in the early 2000s, I found there to be an inverse relationship between résumé quality and candidate quality (with one notable exception — résumés written in LaTeX were usually of high quality and almost always indicated a quality candidate). Originally I had a similar conception about résumés — they should be one or two pages max, should look nice, and should contain no errors. For obviously this indicated a candidate who cared about how they represented themselves. How could a candidate with a slap dash résumé be any good? But time and again the better candidates had the worse résumés ... résumés that were pages long, or completely unformatted, or filled with errors. Perhaps these candidates with poor résumés have simply prioritized their time on their work, not tending their résumé. Or perhaps they feel that they should be judged on the content of their résumé and not its presentation. Regardless, I no longer put any stock in how a résumé looks, only wheter it indicates an appropriate background for the job.
- smcl 9y ago
  How do you determine that? I wrote mine in LaTeX but submit a PDF. Usually that default LaTeX font is a dead giveaway, but I find it to be pretty ugly so I switched it out.
  - kccqzy 9y ago
    It’s part of the metadata. Look for content creator and PDF producer fields. Or even more simply, just use your eyes. The superior line breaking algorithm is extremely obvious, with or without microtype. Then less obviously, look at ligatures, kerning etc.
    - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
      Doesn't mean much since tooling like Sphinx will generate Latex as an intermediary for PDF generation. I don't care for the rigidity of Latex and don't want to hand craft my own TeX documents. I once had a resume generation system that would convert ReST to Docbook and from there used XSLT to produce plain text, docx, and PDF output using XSL-FO. Sadly the code was on a failed Seagate drive and is lost. And yes I had a backup, also on a Seagate drive that also failed due to a firmware bug around the same time.
pellucide 9y ago
I deliberately put 3-4 typos on my resume to weeed ouut the carelesss screeners.
jldugger 9y ago
We can recognize that hiring is a noisy process, and still seek to raise the noise:signal ratio. As long as management doesn't excuse existing heuristics as good enough because all 'heuristics are going to be biased and stupid in some ways'. Like half of engineering is designing new & improved heuristics. Dan's point is largely that for each new & shiny technology you add to your stack, and then add to your hiring filter, you shrink your hiring pool substantially. You can do new & shiny, or you can hire day 1 productive staff experienced in your tech stack. Many firms look at their budgets and choose the latter, but if you don't have budget to train staff, you probably don't have budget to hire experienced staff either. So while the recruiting slogan is 'we only the best', in practice you get 'we only hire the tiny fraction of new grads who've been researching our exact tech stack in their spare time'.
- beat 9y ago
  This reminds me of a story about hiring (from a book which name I can't remember offhand). The author was hiring a team in India, and facing an onslaught of thousands of basically identical resumes. How to filter them? So he added "Ruby" as a requirement - not because it was required by the project, but because at that time, only programmers who really cared about their craft learned Ruby. This got rid of 99% of the junk resumes.
  - jldugger 9y ago
    So, I think we need to discuss the legal concept of 'disparate impact.' We've decided that, as an employer of 15 or more people, it's your duty to avoid even accidental racial bias without justification. Normally this isn't a problem as screening criteria like experience in language X is a bona fide job requirement, so even if such criterion filtered out minorities disproportionately, it's not a liability. Tacking on filters like 'must know programming language not used at this company' is going to be a huge stretch, and if your African American candidate pool is filtered out more regularly, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. So yes, crafting heuristics is hard, but manager's paychecks are larger for a reason.
    - 9y ago
austincheney 9y ago
I don't like resumes as 98% of each is probably bullshit unless the candidate is a truly amazing rockstar with 10+ years of valid experience. As a result any heuristic applied to resumes is just as worthless as most candidates. When I have interviewed in the past I literally stopped reading once I see contact information and save reading it for during the interview. If the contact information is not the first thing on the resume it goes in the trash. For valid heuristics I start by telling candidates something they don't want to hear. If that means they drop out then good riddance as I have 30 other people who are more interested in the position. Examples: * When I did this years ago I would email JavaScript candidates to set up an interview time and I would tell them jQuery isn't available in this job. Half would immediately drop out. Good. * For modern JavaScript candidates tell them the DOM will feature heavily in the interview and there will be no MVC framework. Half will drop out. * A rough equivalent for Java is Spring MVC or forcing architecture considerations. You can filter people pretty fast just by focusing on foundational simple vanilla code questions. It is astonishing how many unqualified people apply for jobs whose resumes are a complete waste of paper. The current employer would only take contractors for new hires (let agencies find the people) and would give out some interview questions to the contract agencies so that candidates knew what to study for before showing up for the interview. Even still only 9 out of 73 interviewed candidates were selected (who knows how many resumes were filtered out).
- citizens 9y ago
  You've mentioned several ways to reduce the number of candidates that you consider for each role, but I don't see how any of it leads to better quality hires.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    When you have hundreds of people to interview, the quantity is a huge problem. You can't interview the majority of them. His question takes away the people who are not interested. It's useful.
    - davehtaylor 9y ago
t420mom 9y ago
You could probably do just as well with random selection as relying on a heuristic. Most people with relevant training and experience are capable of doing the job, most of those are capable of doing it extremely well when supported with training - probably better than "the best", because their cup is not full. I've yet to see a resume screening process or interview process that reliably weeds out the 1-5% of bad picks. I have seen screening processes reject perfectly good candidates. A company could probably do very well by letting go of the idea that you need to find the best candidate in a stack of 100 resumes, and instead just pick anyone with the needed qualifications and support them with training. As the article mentions, the current approach performs poorly and wastes time and money.
compumike 9y ago
(Disclosure: I'm one of the engineers and technical interviewers at Triplebyte.) This comment is spot on: most companies are forced to create cheap heuristics for filtering engineering applicants, and most of these quick-to-evaluate rules will have surprisingly high false positive and false negative rates. You'll miss out on great engineers you auto-reject, and spend hours interviewing people you shouldn't. Part of the reason for unfairness is that everyone doing hiring is creating these heuristics independently. Better filters are possible -- we've found that it's even better when you avoid resumes entirely and go background-blind! But these are no longer simple "if typos >= 2 then reject" or "if GPA > 3.x" heuristics, and are of sufficient complexity that they're beyond the scope of each individual company or hiring manager to develop independently.
- throwayit 9y ago
  If these heuristics are terrible, shouldn't these companies just throw away applications at random? At least this way you don't delude yourself in believing your heuristics are rational.
hyperpape 9y ago
I don't even disagree with this. It's just also an admission that you don't hire the best. We can argue about whether there are 10x developers or not, but it doesn't matter for this discussion. If you assume that a developer is going to be with you for a year or more, then it starts to be worth a week or more of your (collective) time to improve the expected productivity of the people you hire by 10%. Not 2x, not 10x, just 10%. If you aren't spending that time, then you're tacitly either admitting that you're not good at accurately assessing talent, or that you think any warm body will do equally well at your job. Either way, I don't think you're really disagreeing with the core of Dan's post.
- aetherson 9y ago
  If you have 100 candidates for a job, then doing a half-hour phone screen for all 100 of them is 50 hours of work -- a bit more than one whole work-week. And if you're committed to not missing a candidate who might be really good but your heuristics would lead to a false negative on, how much does a half-hour phone screen really tell you? I mean, can you really reject more than half of the candidates based on a half-hour phone screen if you're committed to a very low false-negative rate? What are you going to do, bring 50 candidates into the office for half-day interviews? You've now brought your sunk cost of interviewing from one person-week to 6 person-weeks. And you've also actually probably spent 3 months doing this process, so you've probably also delayed actually hiring someone for at least a month. 10 person-weeks worth of productivity starts looking a lot less good compared to a 10% productivity bonus.
  - mrkurt 9y ago
    Given how unreliable interviews can be (both phone and in person), you'd have to solve it with another mechanism. At my last company, we "screened" ~200-500 candidates per job with a work sample. It was really hard to put together, and worked amazingly well once we had it going. We did a structured interview everyone who passed the work samples and it never felt like a waste of time.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    The first round of filtering is one of the jobs HR is supposed to do.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lynnetye 9y ago
I'm a web developer who has been thinking about engineering hiring and culture a LOT over the last 6 months. I'm confused about employers' desire to cast a wide net, only to filter through applicants thoughtlessly. Instead, why don't engineering teams save time and energy by articulating their specific engineering values, and sharing that information up front? Be honest. Say divisive things. This will allow job-seekers to self-filter. Your goal is not to attract every software engineer. Your goal is to attract the people you are most likely to hire. (Career pages can be fluff, and job descriptions are dry and uninformative beyond a list of technologies.) I've been working on Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.io https://www.keyvalues.io) for many months now trying to do just this: surface details about actual team members, day-to-day processes, and a team's engineering culture. At least this way, we as engineers can be more informed when deciding where to apply, where we'll devote hours/energy interviewing. Of course engineers might be skeptical or have questions, but at least we have something to respond to. Ultimately, neither job-seekers nor employers want to waste time and energy interviewing people they aren't culturally aligned w/. Maybe the lesson here is that engineers should seek out the teams that care about what they care about, whether it's mentorship, high quality code, or work/life balance. I know it's controversial (especially here in HN), but is salary really more important than doing work that is exciting/challenging/energizing/stimulating or feeling valued/appreciated/respected/passionate?
- teen 9y ago
  > This will allow job-seekers to self-filter ?? The problem is not employers casting a wide net, but everyone applying for the job.
  - lynnetye 9y ago
    There are two problems: For employers, it's casting a wide net and then struggling to filter out "noise" quickly. Employers will use pass on great engineers and interview not-so great ones (see parent comment). Instead of saying, "Work for us, we're the best!" why don't engineering teams say, "We prioritize speed over quality, are great for individual contributors, and prefer asynchronous comms over lots of meetings. Work for us if this sounds like you." For job-seekers, the problem is applying to dozens to companies that you don't even want to work for (and just don't know it yet). If I value quality over speed, prefer working in teams rather than independently, and believe in-person meetings are incredibly valuable, then I would know not to even both applying to the company above.
hazza1 9y ago
In my experience recruitment consultants will often try and "improve" the CVs they submit, even if it's just to fit into a template. I've seen many spelling mistake sneak in here. You may well be rejecting candidates based on their recruiter.

by beat 9y ago

digitalsushi 9y ago

i overheard this in an elevator, "our HR department tosses the bottom half of resumes in the pile into the trash because we refuse to hire unlucky people"

volkk 9y ago
ha. except perhaps they're the unlucky ones because they chucked out a great engineers resume and the engineer is actually the lucky one ;)
- cwbrandsma 9y ago
  or, "the lucky engineers had their resumes tossed in the trash so they didn't have to waist their time at that company"
  - volkk 9y ago
    that's what i was implying
drzaiusapelord 9y ago
And recruiters and managers wonder why applicants spam hundreds of cookie cutter resumes and cover letters instead of painstakingly crafting each one. Or why they get annoyed at 'job portal' applications where we have to retype our resume into the various little text boxes the web application provides. Its just a numbers game if you don't have a relationship with someone who can get you a new job. > refuse to hire unlucky people Not getting hired there seems to be the 'lucky' move. Arbitrary hiring guarantees, over time, some pretty terrible characters that a proper hiring process would filter out. If you're pissing away 50% of your potential and, say, there's a 20% chance of getting a 'good' person, now there's a 10% chance of that. Over time, a place with such hiring standards would most likely build out a corporate culture that's subpar. The rare 'good' hires would probably take off much earlier than need be because there's so many more 'bad' hires. Eventually the 'bad' hires rule the roost and then people act surprised at gross incompetence as the norm in many companies, shameless dishonesty, and various forms of harassment being normalized. I worked at a place that didn't take hiring very seriously and this is exactly what ended up happening.
- spenczar5 9y ago
  It's a joke from the British version of the Office.
  - drzaiusapelord 9y ago
    Poe's Law I suppose.
- Majora320 9y ago
  Except that isn't how statistics work. If you have 100 applications, 20% of which are good, and drop 50% of them, you get 50 applications, but you still have the 20% good application/bad application rate. Of course, you still get 50% less total good applications, but ratios != total.
  - drzaiusapelord 9y ago
    If there are 10 'good' hires in the initial pile, then cutting out 5 arbitrarily lowers your chance of getting any one of those 10 by half instantly. This is what I was trying to express. At the end of the day there are only so many 'good' applicants.
pascalxus 9y ago
Perhaps, don't take it too literally. I suspect that comment must have been out of desperation, a satirical comment meant to criticize their woefully inadequate hiring process.
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  From what I've seen in academia, this is a surprisingly adequate process. I've seen them do phone interviews, Skype interviews, divinations, psychometrical testings, on-sites - and then none of their unicorns is right colour. The commitee declares a failed search and tries again the following semester. You'd think that many, if not most of the people in the applicant pile could do an adequate job, perhaps with some training, considering what the job market looks like in the life sciences. Instead they play precious and then they have to make do with some last-minute lecturer, and that at times plays out really bad.
gknoy 9y ago
You joke, but this is very similar to the Secretary Problem's optimal solution [0] [1]: > The optimal cutoff tends to n/e as n increases, and the best applicant is selected with probability 1/e. So, you deliberately reject a first cohort of applicants, and then pick the first person you encounter that's better than the best one you rejected. Obviously, in the joke that's not possible as they are neglecting to interview them, so I think the sibling comments are correct about it being a skewering of the hiring process, but it's neat that there's such a close parallel. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15567307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15567307
user5994461 9y ago
Have you ever seen a pile of one thousand resumes that you have to go through? I will give you a tip. You can't read them all. Don't even bother trying.
- pellucide 9y ago
  If you get a thousand resumes for a few jobs, then reading/analyzing/grading resumes are useless indicator of talent. You have to resort to some other process.
finiter 9y ago
Related: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people.html http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unluc... And HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134

Blazespinnaker 9y ago

no, your filtering mechanism is irresponsible. I'd recommend relying less on resumes and more on referrals from a trusted network.

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
Trusted network is even worse for bias; at least from my experience with shops that have tried both. It's how you kill diversity, arrest your growth, and let fallow the connections to recruiting pipelines that might help you escape once you realize how deep you've gotten.
- jacurtis 9y ago
  Exactly, i argue that trusted networks are the easiest way to build bias in a company, kill diversity, and establish an echo chamber.
  - daniel_reetz 9y ago
    You also tend to reconstruct failed teams. I've worked at places where people hired all their old friends who (collectively) failed to deliver on the last big promise, or executed poorly. You end up spending your referral bonus money on rebuilding cliques and their biases toward failure.
jasonpeacock 9y ago
Now you're promoting "who you know", which is irresponsible as it can pass up many qualified candidates who don't happen to be in the same circles as you. Does "trusted network" mean alumni clubs? Church groups? Gym friends? What would be an un-biased trusted network to filter candidates with?
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  > Church groups? Now you have a defacto "If you're not in the boss's religion or congregation you can just piss right off" thing going on which is toxic for the workplace. Even if you were, say the same Christian denomination as him, are you willing to drive to the boss's wealthy suburb to go to the wealthy suburban church every Sunday solely for your career? Nothing says the organization doesn't care about merit or diversity than church hiring.

rdiddly 9y ago

So optimizing for making resumes go away, and resigning yourself to shouldering the long-term burdens the article describes. That's what you're describing and that's certainly one way to do it.

afpx 9y ago

First, there may not be a tech shortage if teams are “weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles....” But, if there is, I’m assuming that candidates are just applying randomly to any positions that are available. The ‘Tinder’ strategy is probably a good one if the goal is to maximize earnings. However, if one is a ‘5’ it makes sense to spam all of the positions. But, if one is a ‘10’, it makes sense to avoid interviewing all together because there is diminishing returns: too much work for too little potential gain. So, the other question is if the hiring process is so ineffective, why aren’t companies innovating? There must be lack of competition in the market if companies are willing to wait several months and spend thousands of dollars to fill a role while also missing out on the best candidates.

paulddraper 9y ago
> I’m assuming that candidates are just applying randomly to any positions that are available Yep, that's it. The same cost-benefits dynamics as spam mail.
psadri 9y ago
I think google did a good job of this in the early days. They got the word out on the street that their interviews were notoriously difficult. That probably dissuaded a lot of the random applicants. I also read somewhere that some big bank (Goldman) just has a very circuitous, lengthy application process and the main point of it is to weed out the spray and pray applicants.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  i’m pretty certain google is the most applied to company in the world so not sure if that holds up
  - tzakrajs 9y ago
    It helps to keep the illusion of exclusivity the more people you turn away.
  - 9y ago

Gargoyle 9y ago

This is fine if it's how you want to handle it, but you can not ever complain about a shortage of qualified candidates.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

If you're going to filter on typos, you may as well put a hackerrank/leetcode question as the initial filter, or invent your own question. That will save you and your team more time since you will only get respondents that pass and you don't need to review every resume yourself for typos.

pklausler 9y ago
I don't know about the original poster, but I'll immediately spot every error in spelling, punctuation, and usage in a ten-second skim of a page. My eyes just go right to them. And yes, I consider that it's difficult to write correct English. But if you're willing to send out an erroneous resume without getting it competently reviewed, I have to suspect the depth of your commitment to quality overall.
- pizza234 9y ago
  > And yes, I consider that it's difficult to write correct English. But if you're willing to send out an erroneous resume without getting it competently reviewed, I have to suspect the depth of your commitment to quality overall. Is this theory or practice? People who individually craft CVs and cover letters (I do) go through a very resource consuming process. Having all the CVs and cover letters externally reviewed makes the process even more resource consuming. It's crucial to differentiate spell-checking from proofreading. The parent specified spell-checking; there is a reason to be strict on this, and it's that spell-checking a document takes less than a minute with a word processor, so one really needs to be careless to leave more than a couple of spelling mistakes. Proofreading on the other hand, is much more demanding (finding people, coordinating, reviewing and applying changes), and often, gives feedback that may not be very useful or even conflictual between reviewers. I don't think proofreading for more than a handful of CVs/CLs is realistic (expect for the CV-maniacs).
  - pklausler 9y ago
    You meant "except".
- 9y ago

wanderingbort 9y ago

> It's irresponsible. While I agree, it would be irresponsible to exhaustively interview isn't a key metric for a _good_ hiring process how efficiently you can find/place candidates who _do_ excel in the role? By that turn, shouldn't a responsible hiring manager constantly be evaluating and improving their heuristics so that their front-line filtering is less biased and stupid in the ways that materially affect the quality of hires? I don't think the point is that we can remove heuristic filtering from the process. Heuristics are necessary in hiring but this doesn't justify being dismissive of a discussion about whether a certain class of heuristics is really serving the needs of the organization.

static_noise 9y ago

People learn about and optimize for those heuristics. Those resumes will on average get better and better over time until half of them are almost perfect. Those people all spent considerable time and energy on optimizing their resume. You get people who look good on paper. They will continue to excel in your company (on paper). If your job is to look good on paper. Yes, go on.

HeavyStorm 9y ago
You should at least look good on paper. I'll not hire you because you have a wonderful resume, but I'll interview you. And I'll not interview you if your resume looks bad. (truth be said, I'm not the one selecting resumes right now, and sometimes I get garbage that I wouldn't even interview)
- monocasa 9y ago
  I think it's fair to keep in mind that the developers you want don't have a lot of experience interviewing (they tend to get snatched up as soon as they're on the market, if not before), and the ones you definitely don't want might have more experience interviewing than doing their actual job.
s73ver_ 9y ago
To be perfectly honest, I can't see proofreading your resume to be that big of a burden. And if you can't bother to do that, what else can't you bother to do while on the job?

gwbas1c 9y ago

Yes, but: Being hand-delivered a resume from a trusted colleague is a filtering mechanism. It won't guarantee a phone call, but it's a better recommendation than a recruiter trying to gain a commission on this week's "really awesome superstar."

beat 9y ago
A hand-delivered resume from someone I trust is almost guaranteed an interview, regardless of typos!

einarfd 9y ago

> I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. Getting someone to look over your stuff and looking for spelling errors sounds like a simple and easy fix doesn’t it? But in my experience that doesn't work as well as one would think, prof reading is a lot harder than it looks. After all it's isn't enough to catch some of the errors, you need to catch them all. As someone that has close family members with dyslexia, and have struggled with spelling all my life. I have to say that seeing those challenges characterised as carelessness is infuriating. For a lot of people getting spelling right is easy, and that is great. But for some of us it is not, while prof reading and spell checkers might help, they are not a magical fix all. Some errors often sneak through, no matter what you do.

jgust 9y ago
Did you misspell prof(sic) to make a point, or was that a happy accident?
- stult 9y ago
  The prof is in the pudding.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    Speaking of correctness... This has always bothered me because I grew up understanding the correct phrase to be "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" and assumed that the shorter form arose because of people who simply didn't know what it really meant. So I googled it and it turns out that the short form, "the proof is in the pudding," has been around since the 1920's (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_proof_of_the_pudding_is_in_the_eating https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_proof_of_the_pudding_is_i...). So, it's got some legs! I still don't think the short form makes any sense, but at least it's not a recent phenomenon caused by clueless hipsters :-)
    - gnopgnip 9y ago

tlogan 9y ago

I 100% understand and I was doing the same. Your approach is ctually the problem. Hiring should be very very important - maybe even the top priority. The two most important things in the company should be: hiring and sales. In that respect, you need to invest into hiring in same was as you invest into sales. For example, sales have much much better heuristics algorithms while hiring is all about weird and random rules.

tormeh 9y ago
Hiring is the most important thing a company ever does. Bad hiring means you'll get a bad company. In the US you can partly balance this by firing diligently, but that has its own problems. Tech staff shouldn't waste their time in hopeless cases, but assuming your applicants aren't all about the same the return on hiring the best one could be huge.

watwut 9y ago

If you are so flooded by resumes, you really should be more specific in your job ad. By that, I mean you should describe the position you look to fill I details, including uncomfortable parts. People will self select way more. As is now, many job ads work as something attempting to sell position - but you are flooded by people you don't want (else you would just pick 5 random to interview).

beat 9y ago
When I've been in this situation, I wasn't the one making the job description. In general, I feel the hiring process focuses on the wrong things. Buzzword compliance is a major problem. Experience in problem spaces is much harder to capture in a resume than a list of technologies that can be software-grepped for the benefit of technically clueless recruiters and HR. Similarly, I'm not a fan of most technical reviews. They tend to focus on gotcha questions and think-on-your-feet trivial programming exercises that have virtually no bearing on real life as an engineer. To be fair, they can help, but they often exclude excellent engineers who aren't as good at the on-your-feet game as they are at the big picture game. When interviewing candidates, I tend to pick up on an interesting experience on their resume, and ask them to talk about it. What went right? What went wrong? What was your role in the solution? Heuristic: Candidates who blame others for failures, especially when they don't praise others for success, get a big black mark. I don't usually like working with people who are looking for someone to blame, regardless of their skill. Heuristic: When someone starts talking about some project and really geeks out about it, getting into the details of how the solution worked and why it delighted them, gets a huge plus. First, it means they were actually at the core and understood what was going on. Second, it says what they care about. Sometimes, I'll get them talking about their best experiences as an engineer, or their worst, just to hear the geek come out. It's very telling. And I have usually decided on a candidate in the first five to ten minutes of an interview. If it's no, it's no. If it's yes, the rest of the interview is mostly about validating my initial impression.
- watwut 9y ago
  I think that asking overly hard technical questions is bad for reasons you said, but if an engineer gets offended over simple "implement linked list" or other basic exercise, something is wrong with that engineer. Either it is that he/she masks some lack of basic knowledge or he/she is too much of primadona. It is perfectly ok for interviewer to check on basic skills, since all interviewer goes by is what you say about yourself. But, if I had enough social skills to tone down "geeking" withing 10 minutes of interview with stranger, you would not hire me? That is just side note through. The older I am, the less I like to frame myself as "geek", there are some cultural aspects I have grown to dislike. A lot of "geekinesss" is actually trying to be cool rather then anything else.

zentiggr 9y ago

Honest question - how does this relate to some of the anecdotes in the OP - where someone referred to recruiter/HR as a desirable hire by a current employee gets denied because <some clueless resume scan criteria fail>? That's the real kicker in the whole article... when "We want this person!" doesn't work because crustimoney proseedcake.

beat 9y ago
I'm trying to explain why heuristics start getting applied in the first place.

oldandtired 9y ago

I don't want to be too critical, but you have a number of grammatical errors in your comment. I believe this shows how easy it can be to get at least 2 typographical errors in even a short piece of communication. I am sure that this comment will infringe on someone's standard.

wooter 9y ago
really? you don't think its evidence that we invest varying levels of effort into things we care about? thusly, a candidate with typographical errors is closer internet-comment-level interested effort-wise in the position.
- oldandtired 9y ago
  Claiming something is easy to do and then making the same errors simply diminished the strength of the argument presented. The comment comes across as "do as I say, not do as I do."
  - intro-b 9y ago
    it's fun for text-based debate, but aren't you just ignoring the greater contextual situation for the sake of argument? the distance between anonymous internet comments and professional discourse is wider than what you're implying
    - oldandtired 9y ago
      Why should the distance between between anonymous internet comments and professional discourse be wide? If your comment is about professional matters then you should have enough professionalism to make you point appropriately.
      - intro-b 9y ago
        i mean, from my understanding of the english language, these kinds of things are usually contextual based on the medium, not the content of the message. i suppose everyone has their different interpretations, though

Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago

"Let me randomly filter these and hope for the best" is the essence of your suggestion for screening candidates. It doesn't sound very good. It sounds like you should be investing more time into interviewing more people instead of throwing away folks who could excel, but fail an arbitrary heuristic. That is to say, instead of throwing away 19 out of 20... don't throw away so many. Obviously you don't need to call in all 20 people, that would be a huge waste of time. But your approach seems too sensitive to the heuristic for the tradeoff of saving a few hours of time to find a person whom you'd hopefully employ for years. I wouldn't take that decision lightly, especially with a small company, though I suppose you can always let them go if it doesn't work out.

beat 9y ago
The thing is, it's not "random". I have a good reason for my filter - it represents attention to detail. And yes, it will exclude the occasional good candidate, but it will exclude far more bad candidates. If I have 100 resumes for two roles, and I can, through heuristics, knock it down to five, then I'm starting with enough "good" resumes to stand at least a chance of filling the two roles. Mind you, we're now about a day's worth of work for a manager, and five interrupted afternoons for the senior/lead engineers doing the interviews. On top of that, the good candidates are going to have other companies competing for them. If my response is "Well, we like this candidate, but let's spend two weeks interviewing another twenty people, just to be sure", my odds of missing the good candidate are pretty high.

kwhitefoot 9y ago

Why is that people don't run a spellcheck? It's rare for me to see even official internal documents without several spelling mistakes even after they have been approved for publication. Just turning on the spelling checker in your favourite word processor, editor, or even web browser will go a long way toward catching most typos. The grammar checker in Word is also worth a try. Did you mean "P. G.'s maxim" when you typed "pg's maximum"? :-)

ghaff 9y ago
As someone who does a huge amount of writing, it's always surprising how many errors still end up slipping through even though I do at least one re-read when I write something. It's basically impossible to do a good proof-reading job on your own work, especially if it's something you've gone through and reworked multiple times like (presumably) a resume.
beat 9y ago
I noticed that even these little HN checkboxes have a grammar checker. Earlier, I carelessly wrote "the the", and it underlined the second "the" as incorrect. And yet, the comments in response to my OP are full of easily detected errors. It's like you have to make an effort to screw it up.
- T-hawk 9y ago
  That's your browser doing the checking, not anything that's part of the HN page.
jstarfish 9y ago
In my experience, spellcheck leaves a lot to be desired. Even on a finished document that I've manually verified as being perfect in terms of spelling and grammar, there's usually still a sea of red and green underlines offering incoherent suggestions in English as dictated by Google Translate. If the authors of the documents you mention are anything like me, we're so used to ignoring false positives that the net result now permits minor errors to slip through.

js2 9y ago

About that heuristic, when hiring for sysadmins in the early 2000s, I found there to be an inverse relationship between résumé quality and candidate quality (with one notable exception — résumés written in LaTeX were usually of high quality and almost always indicated a quality candidate). Originally I had a similar conception about résumés — they should be one or two pages max, should look nice, and should contain no errors. For obviously this indicated a candidate who cared about how they represented themselves. How could a candidate with a slap dash résumé be any good? But time and again the better candidates had the worse résumés ... résumés that were pages long, or completely unformatted, or filled with errors. Perhaps these candidates with poor résumés have simply prioritized their time on their work, not tending their résumé. Or perhaps they feel that they should be judged on the content of their résumé and not its presentation. Regardless, I no longer put any stock in how a résumé looks, only wheter it indicates an appropriate background for the job.

smcl 9y ago
How do you determine that? I wrote mine in LaTeX but submit a PDF. Usually that default LaTeX font is a dead giveaway, but I find it to be pretty ugly so I switched it out.
- kccqzy 9y ago
  It’s part of the metadata. Look for content creator and PDF producer fields. Or even more simply, just use your eyes. The superior line breaking algorithm is extremely obvious, with or without microtype. Then less obviously, look at ligatures, kerning etc.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    Doesn't mean much since tooling like Sphinx will generate Latex as an intermediary for PDF generation. I don't care for the rigidity of Latex and don't want to hand craft my own TeX documents. I once had a resume generation system that would convert ReST to Docbook and from there used XSLT to produce plain text, docx, and PDF output using XSL-FO. Sadly the code was on a failed Seagate drive and is lost. And yes I had a backup, also on a Seagate drive that also failed due to a firmware bug around the same time.

pellucide 9y ago

I deliberately put 3-4 typos on my resume to weeed ouut the carelesss screeners.

jldugger 9y ago

We can recognize that hiring is a noisy process, and still seek to raise the noise:signal ratio. As long as management doesn't excuse existing heuristics as good enough because all 'heuristics are going to be biased and stupid in some ways'. Like half of engineering is designing new & improved heuristics. Dan's point is largely that for each new & shiny technology you add to your stack, and then add to your hiring filter, you shrink your hiring pool substantially. You can do new & shiny, or you can hire day 1 productive staff experienced in your tech stack. Many firms look at their budgets and choose the latter, but if you don't have budget to train staff, you probably don't have budget to hire experienced staff either. So while the recruiting slogan is 'we only the best', in practice you get 'we only hire the tiny fraction of new grads who've been researching our exact tech stack in their spare time'.

beat 9y ago
This reminds me of a story about hiring (from a book which name I can't remember offhand). The author was hiring a team in India, and facing an onslaught of thousands of basically identical resumes. How to filter them? So he added "Ruby" as a requirement - not because it was required by the project, but because at that time, only programmers who really cared about their craft learned Ruby. This got rid of 99% of the junk resumes.
- jldugger 9y ago
  So, I think we need to discuss the legal concept of 'disparate impact.' We've decided that, as an employer of 15 or more people, it's your duty to avoid even accidental racial bias without justification. Normally this isn't a problem as screening criteria like experience in language X is a bona fide job requirement, so even if such criterion filtered out minorities disproportionately, it's not a liability. Tacking on filters like 'must know programming language not used at this company' is going to be a huge stretch, and if your African American candidate pool is filtered out more regularly, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. So yes, crafting heuristics is hard, but manager's paychecks are larger for a reason.
  - 9y ago

austincheney 9y ago

I don't like resumes as 98% of each is probably bullshit unless the candidate is a truly amazing rockstar with 10+ years of valid experience. As a result any heuristic applied to resumes is just as worthless as most candidates. When I have interviewed in the past I literally stopped reading once I see contact information and save reading it for during the interview. If the contact information is not the first thing on the resume it goes in the trash. For valid heuristics I start by telling candidates something they don't want to hear. If that means they drop out then good riddance as I have 30 other people who are more interested in the position. Examples: * When I did this years ago I would email JavaScript candidates to set up an interview time and I would tell them jQuery isn't available in this job. Half would immediately drop out. Good. * For modern JavaScript candidates tell them the DOM will feature heavily in the interview and there will be no MVC framework. Half will drop out. * A rough equivalent for Java is Spring MVC or forcing architecture considerations. You can filter people pretty fast just by focusing on foundational simple vanilla code questions. It is astonishing how many unqualified people apply for jobs whose resumes are a complete waste of paper. The current employer would only take contractors for new hires (let agencies find the people) and would give out some interview questions to the contract agencies so that candidates knew what to study for before showing up for the interview. Even still only 9 out of 73 interviewed candidates were selected (who knows how many resumes were filtered out).

citizens 9y ago
You've mentioned several ways to reduce the number of candidates that you consider for each role, but I don't see how any of it leads to better quality hires.
- user5994461 9y ago
  When you have hundreds of people to interview, the quantity is a huge problem. You can't interview the majority of them. His question takes away the people who are not interested. It's useful.
  - davehtaylor 9y ago

t420mom 9y ago

You could probably do just as well with random selection as relying on a heuristic. Most people with relevant training and experience are capable of doing the job, most of those are capable of doing it extremely well when supported with training - probably better than "the best", because their cup is not full. I've yet to see a resume screening process or interview process that reliably weeds out the 1-5% of bad picks. I have seen screening processes reject perfectly good candidates. A company could probably do very well by letting go of the idea that you need to find the best candidate in a stack of 100 resumes, and instead just pick anyone with the needed qualifications and support them with training. As the article mentions, the current approach performs poorly and wastes time and money.

compumike 9y ago

(Disclosure: I'm one of the engineers and technical interviewers at Triplebyte.) This comment is spot on: most companies are forced to create cheap heuristics for filtering engineering applicants, and most of these quick-to-evaluate rules will have surprisingly high false positive and false negative rates. You'll miss out on great engineers you auto-reject, and spend hours interviewing people you shouldn't. Part of the reason for unfairness is that everyone doing hiring is creating these heuristics independently. Better filters are possible -- we've found that it's even better when you avoid resumes entirely and go background-blind! But these are no longer simple "if typos >= 2 then reject" or "if GPA > 3.x" heuristics, and are of sufficient complexity that they're beyond the scope of each individual company or hiring manager to develop independently.

throwayit 9y ago
If these heuristics are terrible, shouldn't these companies just throw away applications at random? At least this way you don't delude yourself in believing your heuristics are rational.

hyperpape 9y ago

I don't even disagree with this. It's just also an admission that you don't hire the best. We can argue about whether there are 10x developers or not, but it doesn't matter for this discussion. If you assume that a developer is going to be with you for a year or more, then it starts to be worth a week or more of your (collective) time to improve the expected productivity of the people you hire by 10%. Not 2x, not 10x, just 10%. If you aren't spending that time, then you're tacitly either admitting that you're not good at accurately assessing talent, or that you think any warm body will do equally well at your job. Either way, I don't think you're really disagreeing with the core of Dan's post.

aetherson 9y ago
If you have 100 candidates for a job, then doing a half-hour phone screen for all 100 of them is 50 hours of work -- a bit more than one whole work-week. And if you're committed to not missing a candidate who might be really good but your heuristics would lead to a false negative on, how much does a half-hour phone screen really tell you? I mean, can you really reject more than half of the candidates based on a half-hour phone screen if you're committed to a very low false-negative rate? What are you going to do, bring 50 candidates into the office for half-day interviews? You've now brought your sunk cost of interviewing from one person-week to 6 person-weeks. And you've also actually probably spent 3 months doing this process, so you've probably also delayed actually hiring someone for at least a month. 10 person-weeks worth of productivity starts looking a lot less good compared to a 10% productivity bonus.
- mrkurt 9y ago
  Given how unreliable interviews can be (both phone and in person), you'd have to solve it with another mechanism. At my last company, we "screened" ~200-500 candidates per job with a work sample. It was really hard to put together, and worked amazingly well once we had it going. We did a structured interview everyone who passed the work samples and it never felt like a waste of time.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The first round of filtering is one of the jobs HR is supposed to do.

deleted 9y ago

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lynnetye 9y ago

I'm a web developer who has been thinking about engineering hiring and culture a LOT over the last 6 months. I'm confused about employers' desire to cast a wide net, only to filter through applicants thoughtlessly. Instead, why don't engineering teams save time and energy by articulating their specific engineering values, and sharing that information up front? Be honest. Say divisive things. This will allow job-seekers to self-filter. Your goal is not to attract every software engineer. Your goal is to attract the people you are most likely to hire. (Career pages can be fluff, and job descriptions are dry and uninformative beyond a list of technologies.) I've been working on Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.io https://www.keyvalues.io) for many months now trying to do just this: surface details about actual team members, day-to-day processes, and a team's engineering culture. At least this way, we as engineers can be more informed when deciding where to apply, where we'll devote hours/energy interviewing. Of course engineers might be skeptical or have questions, but at least we have something to respond to. Ultimately, neither job-seekers nor employers want to waste time and energy interviewing people they aren't culturally aligned w/. Maybe the lesson here is that engineers should seek out the teams that care about what they care about, whether it's mentorship, high quality code, or work/life balance. I know it's controversial (especially here in HN), but is salary really more important than doing work that is exciting/challenging/energizing/stimulating or feeling valued/appreciated/respected/passionate?

teen 9y ago
> This will allow job-seekers to self-filter ?? The problem is not employers casting a wide net, but everyone applying for the job.
- lynnetye 9y ago
  There are two problems: For employers, it's casting a wide net and then struggling to filter out "noise" quickly. Employers will use pass on great engineers and interview not-so great ones (see parent comment). Instead of saying, "Work for us, we're the best!" why don't engineering teams say, "We prioritize speed over quality, are great for individual contributors, and prefer asynchronous comms over lots of meetings. Work for us if this sounds like you." For job-seekers, the problem is applying to dozens to companies that you don't even want to work for (and just don't know it yet). If I value quality over speed, prefer working in teams rather than independently, and believe in-person meetings are incredibly valuable, then I would know not to even both applying to the company above.

hazza1 9y ago

In my experience recruitment consultants will often try and "improve" the CVs they submit, even if it's just to fit into a template. I've seen many spelling mistake sneak in here. You may well be rejecting candidates based on their recruiter.