5 ms·

So which garden hoses of resumes should I put my resume into--rather than the fire hose--if I want to be hired by a good company that follows your recommendatio

So which garden hoses of resumes should I put my resume into--rather than the fire hose--if I want to be hired by a good company that follows your recommendations? If you don't drink from the fire hose, you're accepting the intrinsic biases of the lower-flux feeds that you do use, and missing the candidates that won't necessarily know to stand exactly where you are willing to search for them. But then, if you do disclose your sources, and everyone starts using them, those eventually increase in volume and decrease in quality as well. The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as high-quality for individual benefit. Why not have some of the candidates vet each other? Give everyone a random set of N partially anonymized resumes, and ask them to pick the one out of the N that they would most enjoy working with at your company.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
This is very true, and if you find that for your use case, you really need that bigger fire hose, then by all means go for it. But you have to agree you're shifting different costs around. If you go with the fire hose, you have to pay the weed-through-tons-of-resumes costs, often including build outs of application systems, standardized portals and application/interview pipelines, third-party recruiter overhead, etc. I would argue that even if the fire hose is allowing you more access to the tail of some candidate distribution, it is not worth that cost, and in all likelihood the best candidates would be reachable through other means anyway. In reality, many of the companies that use these big recruiting platforms designed to wrangle an internet fire hose of resumes fall into two camps (yes, an oversimplification, but often useful): - big corps who want a large pool of resumes solely to put downward pressure on salary -- these are the same companies that will ask you to do a 20 minute song and dance interview with someone from HR right at the start, which is nothing but pretense to ask about your salary requirements, and immediately reject you if you either won't say or say something too high. This kind of place right away communicates that engineering managers don't have the power to hire good people, only people who were cheap enough to pass the initial HR filter. - Places that cargo-cult copy the hiring process of other, uncommonly successful places. When you focus on cultivating a smaller network of places to request resumes, you do pay a cost. You do immediately prevent yourself from good candidates who wouldn't just happen to be in your targeted applicant communities. But this is life. Trade-offs. Do you know that this cost is worse than all the costs associated with the huge big-box applicant pipelines? I mean, people using those pipelines are still often heard griping about how hard it is to find candidates and how long it takes. My experience has been that the benefits of narrow, specialty / community focused requests for applicants work out to be a lot better overall, even if I have to endure some unpleasant costs to do it that way. No method is perfect, so you have to look at the trade-offs. And as always, your mileage may vary. > "The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as high-quality for individual benefit." I actually really disagree with this, and I think it just perpetuates the myths about tech hiring. In reality, very few applicants are "masquerading" (and, by the way, all applicants are in it for individual benefit). People seriously overestimate how many applicants are "fakers" -- especially because they will ask some asinine hazing trivia, like some useless question about esoteric data structure internals, and then when someone can't answer it perfectly in 20 minutes, they'll be declared a "faker" and the interviewer will jump on Hacker News and write some comment embellishing the situation, as if the candidate ran away in terms when asked to solve FizzBuzz, despite having 10 Ivy League degrees on their resume. It's nuts. Few people are fakers. It's safe to assume applicants are sincere, and then technically probe them. If they can't speak with you in good technical detail about their experience or studies, it doesn't meant they are a faker, but it might mean they aren't the match for your role. Be nice to them, give them useful feedback, and move on. But I can't even imagine how awful it must be to harbor such a cynical attitude that you need to be significantly worries about people "masquerading" during interviews. It really, truly just isn't true, not even when you do use a fire hose stream of resumes.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off. There will be a suitable candidate for you in there. You don't need to filter by any specific criterion, and you can rely on the random confluence of people that are looking for work just as you happen to be taking resumes. If you don't believe the fire hose is full of unsuitable candidates, and you can't evaluate more than 100 resumes, then don't take 10000 resumes and try to filter it down to 100 with outside resources. Just take 100 resumes to start with, and go from there. The assumption that the fire hose is filled with low-quality resumes is intrinsic in your suggestion to get resumes from other sources. Everyone has pumped their resume into the big reservoir at one time or another. Not everyone has supplied--or even known about--all the various garden hoses. If the fire hose isn't full of junk, why would anyone intentionally not use it? Even if you can only evaluate 10 resumes at a time, spin the valve on the fire hose until 10 squirt out, and evaluate them. It's okay to have your search fail, because you can always spin the valve again to get 10 more. Even if your search succeeds, you can still get another 10 resumes from the fire hose. That's the whole point of having it. If people stop tapping that reservoir, the candidates go somewhere else. They stop putting resumes on Monster and go to Indeed. They stop using job sites and go to LinkedIn. They get tired of the recruiter spam on LinkedIn and go to Facebook groups. You're relying on the candidates you want to be surfing the same wave of signal-to-noise that you are, and to be fighting the same arms race of eminently-suitable-for-the-job versus oh-yeah-prove-it. By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X than they actually have. It isn't that they can't do X, but they aren't what you specifically asked for. The specifics in the job advertisement are themselves a type of filter that some people will work to defeat in order to get past the arbitrary filtering layer to the human evaluation layer.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    > If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off. This is wrong because you are presuming your conclusion (that fakers are the problem) already. Fakers aren't a problem, and it is the other reasons for avoiding the fire hose that matter. But generally, I would agree. If it were possible to set up big box resume submission solutions and turn them off after a little while, it would be fine. There would be many qualified candidates. It might depend on exactly what specialized skills you need if hiring for a specialized role, but generally, yeah, you collect 1000 resumes and most of them correspond to people who can do the job, or who would need modest extra training or mentoring to do it at a high level. You collect 1000 resumes and you definitely aren't gonna get 999 "fakers", and this fact isn't really the point. The real problem is that you can't turn off the resume fire hose when your bucket fills up, because the existence of the fire hose is a political problem. You have to deal with HR having their nose in it, meetings and policy and bureaucracy about how to choose workday or greenhouse or some slick new start-up, whether to pay retainers for recruitment firms (who also might have perverse incentives). Most often I, as the hiring manager, have no control over resume collection if it is done through generic application portals, online careers sites, or job aggregator sites. What happens is I get a weekly batch of some unreasonably large number of resumes, have to filter them myself or with my team, and then send back the approved ones to someone in HR. HR then does pre-screeners and comes back and says, "you can't hire any of those people because they all want competitive salaries" and we go again over and over, until 6 months have rolled by, my team is ready to vomit at the sight of another resume, and HR finally breaks down and lets us increase the budget, and we go back to some candidate we wanted to hire from the original batch of resumes, but they got a job in the meantime, and we repeat. Your comment seems to presume that internet scale fire hose of resumes somehow doesn't get managed by a bureaucratic HR system, but that's never the case (anymore, not even in early start-ups). You avoid the fire hose because it requires affixing a bureaucratic collection mechanism to the front that mediates how you are able to review resumes, and limits you from choosing the candidates you want. You're right that if you could turn on the fire hose for some time amount of time then you'd move through qualified candidates very fast. But you can't by the very nature of the apparatuses you are forced to use if you use an internet-wide fire hose at all. > By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X ... I actually think this is more of a symptom of bureaucracy as well. Companies don't usually create job ads for specialist in X, and when they do, they usually are not coherent, and the hiring filters are also not coherent. So the company creates a job ad for specialists in X, but everything about the interview and hiring process makes it impossible for specialists in X to actually get hired (from coding trivia to salary limits to impossible wishlist job ads claiming to want 10 years of experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, etc.) The problem is more that the company is saying, "We define 'specialist in X' as: costs less than $150k, has 13 years of experience with data science, and is an expert with React" because they don't know what they are talking about. The job ad maybe looks like it's a data science position, so someone who would actually be qualified for the job maybe has 5 years of experience in data science and no experience in React because that part is totally a mistake for whoever created the ad. Then some pointy headed recruiter gets the application and thinks, geez this guy only has 5 years experience as a data scientist but we wanted 13, and he doesn't even have experience in React, but it says right here in the job ad they you need it! This guy is masquerading! Anyway, it seems like we probably won't see eye to eye on it, and that's cool. I don't mind if lots of people keep cranking on big solicitations for thousands of resumes, because I can keep flying under the radar and using different techniques to find candidates.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

This is very true, and if you find that for your use case, you really need that bigger fire hose, then by all means go for it. But you have to agree you're shifting different costs around. If you go with the fire hose, you have to pay the weed-through-tons-of-resumes costs, often including build outs of application systems, standardized portals and application/interview pipelines, third-party recruiter overhead, etc. I would argue that even if the fire hose is allowing you more access to the tail of some candidate distribution, it is not worth that cost, and in all likelihood the best candidates would be reachable through other means anyway. In reality, many of the companies that use these big recruiting platforms designed to wrangle an internet fire hose of resumes fall into two camps (yes, an oversimplification, but often useful): - big corps who want a large pool of resumes solely to put downward pressure on salary -- these are the same companies that will ask you to do a 20 minute song and dance interview with someone from HR right at the start, which is nothing but pretense to ask about your salary requirements, and immediately reject you if you either won't say or say something too high. This kind of place right away communicates that engineering managers don't have the power to hire good people, only people who were cheap enough to pass the initial HR filter. - Places that cargo-cult copy the hiring process of other, uncommonly successful places. When you focus on cultivating a smaller network of places to request resumes, you do pay a cost. You do immediately prevent yourself from good candidates who wouldn't just happen to be in your targeted applicant communities. But this is life. Trade-offs. Do you know that this cost is worse than all the costs associated with the huge big-box applicant pipelines? I mean, people using those pipelines are still often heard griping about how hard it is to find candidates and how long it takes. My experience has been that the benefits of narrow, specialty / community focused requests for applicants work out to be a lot better overall, even if I have to endure some unpleasant costs to do it that way. No method is perfect, so you have to look at the trade-offs. And as always, your mileage may vary. > "The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as high-quality for individual benefit." I actually really disagree with this, and I think it just perpetuates the myths about tech hiring. In reality, very few applicants are "masquerading" (and, by the way, all applicants are in it for individual benefit). People seriously overestimate how many applicants are "fakers" -- especially because they will ask some asinine hazing trivia, like some useless question about esoteric data structure internals, and then when someone can't answer it perfectly in 20 minutes, they'll be declared a "faker" and the interviewer will jump on Hacker News and write some comment embellishing the situation, as if the candidate ran away in terms when asked to solve FizzBuzz, despite having 10 Ivy League degrees on their resume. It's nuts. Few people are fakers. It's safe to assume applicants are sincere, and then technically probe them. If they can't speak with you in good technical detail about their experience or studies, it doesn't meant they are a faker, but it might mean they aren't the match for your role. Be nice to them, give them useful feedback, and move on. But I can't even imagine how awful it must be to harbor such a cynical attitude that you need to be significantly worries about people "masquerading" during interviews. It really, truly just isn't true, not even when you do use a fire hose stream of resumes.

logfromblammo 8y ago
If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off. There will be a suitable candidate for you in there. You don't need to filter by any specific criterion, and you can rely on the random confluence of people that are looking for work just as you happen to be taking resumes. If you don't believe the fire hose is full of unsuitable candidates, and you can't evaluate more than 100 resumes, then don't take 10000 resumes and try to filter it down to 100 with outside resources. Just take 100 resumes to start with, and go from there. The assumption that the fire hose is filled with low-quality resumes is intrinsic in your suggestion to get resumes from other sources. Everyone has pumped their resume into the big reservoir at one time or another. Not everyone has supplied--or even known about--all the various garden hoses. If the fire hose isn't full of junk, why would anyone intentionally not use it? Even if you can only evaluate 10 resumes at a time, spin the valve on the fire hose until 10 squirt out, and evaluate them. It's okay to have your search fail, because you can always spin the valve again to get 10 more. Even if your search succeeds, you can still get another 10 resumes from the fire hose. That's the whole point of having it. If people stop tapping that reservoir, the candidates go somewhere else. They stop putting resumes on Monster and go to Indeed. They stop using job sites and go to LinkedIn. They get tired of the recruiter spam on LinkedIn and go to Facebook groups. You're relying on the candidates you want to be surfing the same wave of signal-to-noise that you are, and to be fighting the same arms race of eminently-suitable-for-the-job versus oh-yeah-prove-it. By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X than they actually have. It isn't that they can't do X, but they aren't what you specifically asked for. The specifics in the job advertisement are themselves a type of filter that some people will work to defeat in order to get past the arbitrary filtering layer to the human evaluation layer.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off. This is wrong because you are presuming your conclusion (that fakers are the problem) already. Fakers aren't a problem, and it is the other reasons for avoiding the fire hose that matter. But generally, I would agree. If it were possible to set up big box resume submission solutions and turn them off after a little while, it would be fine. There would be many qualified candidates. It might depend on exactly what specialized skills you need if hiring for a specialized role, but generally, yeah, you collect 1000 resumes and most of them correspond to people who can do the job, or who would need modest extra training or mentoring to do it at a high level. You collect 1000 resumes and you definitely aren't gonna get 999 "fakers", and this fact isn't really the point. The real problem is that you can't turn off the resume fire hose when your bucket fills up, because the existence of the fire hose is a political problem. You have to deal with HR having their nose in it, meetings and policy and bureaucracy about how to choose workday or greenhouse or some slick new start-up, whether to pay retainers for recruitment firms (who also might have perverse incentives). Most often I, as the hiring manager, have no control over resume collection if it is done through generic application portals, online careers sites, or job aggregator sites. What happens is I get a weekly batch of some unreasonably large number of resumes, have to filter them myself or with my team, and then send back the approved ones to someone in HR. HR then does pre-screeners and comes back and says, "you can't hire any of those people because they all want competitive salaries" and we go again over and over, until 6 months have rolled by, my team is ready to vomit at the sight of another resume, and HR finally breaks down and lets us increase the budget, and we go back to some candidate we wanted to hire from the original batch of resumes, but they got a job in the meantime, and we repeat. Your comment seems to presume that internet scale fire hose of resumes somehow doesn't get managed by a bureaucratic HR system, but that's never the case (anymore, not even in early start-ups). You avoid the fire hose because it requires affixing a bureaucratic collection mechanism to the front that mediates how you are able to review resumes, and limits you from choosing the candidates you want. You're right that if you could turn on the fire hose for some time amount of time then you'd move through qualified candidates very fast. But you can't by the very nature of the apparatuses you are forced to use if you use an internet-wide fire hose at all. > By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X ... I actually think this is more of a symptom of bureaucracy as well. Companies don't usually create job ads for specialist in X, and when they do, they usually are not coherent, and the hiring filters are also not coherent. So the company creates a job ad for specialists in X, but everything about the interview and hiring process makes it impossible for specialists in X to actually get hired (from coding trivia to salary limits to impossible wishlist job ads claiming to want 10 years of experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, etc.) The problem is more that the company is saying, "We define 'specialist in X' as: costs less than $150k, has 13 years of experience with data science, and is an expert with React" because they don't know what they are talking about. The job ad maybe looks like it's a data science position, so someone who would actually be qualified for the job maybe has 5 years of experience in data science and no experience in React because that part is totally a mistake for whoever created the ad. Then some pointy headed recruiter gets the application and thinks, geez this guy only has 5 years experience as a data scientist but we wanted 13, and he doesn't even have experience in React, but it says right here in the job ad they you need it! This guy is masquerading! Anyway, it seems like we probably won't see eye to eye on it, and that's cool. I don't mind if lots of people keep cranking on big solicitations for thousands of resumes, because I can keep flying under the radar and using different techniques to find candidates.