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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

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.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it. You use garden hoses because you can sneak them past the fire hose monitors and connect them to a tap in your team's office. Once you have tasted the water and selected an appropriate candidate, then you can smuggle them past the gatekeepers and get them hired. But that still leaves me with the question: if I want to get hired by you, how do I know which garden hose to use? I have seen sane, descriptive job ads that instruct interested applicants to ignore the standard application instructions and e-mail their resume to a particular address, with a specific keyword in the subject line. That indicates a simple filtering program, perhaps with an auto-reply function, that goes to someone not an HR gatekeeper. Some people out there are connecting their own garden hoses to the main reservoir, such that they control the flow rate and the filters. If the reason you don't use the fire hose is because your own company makes it unusable, that doesn't necessarily mean that other companies--especially small ones, with maybe one part-time HR employee--will also make it unusable.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    > So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it. I guess it's a matter of words and it might dissolve our question, because the way I see it, "fire hose" == "people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it". At least, that's what I'm trying to mean by opening yourself up to the problem of managing a fire hose of incoming resumes. The platonic ideal of a large stream of resumes that I can easily slice and dice of my own accord, in practice, doesn't exist and would be so rare as to not factor into the discussion.

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.

logfromblammo 8y ago
So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it. You use garden hoses because you can sneak them past the fire hose monitors and connect them to a tap in your team's office. Once you have tasted the water and selected an appropriate candidate, then you can smuggle them past the gatekeepers and get them hired. But that still leaves me with the question: if I want to get hired by you, how do I know which garden hose to use? I have seen sane, descriptive job ads that instruct interested applicants to ignore the standard application instructions and e-mail their resume to a particular address, with a specific keyword in the subject line. That indicates a simple filtering program, perhaps with an auto-reply function, that goes to someone not an HR gatekeeper. Some people out there are connecting their own garden hoses to the main reservoir, such that they control the flow rate and the filters. If the reason you don't use the fire hose is because your own company makes it unusable, that doesn't necessarily mean that other companies--especially small ones, with maybe one part-time HR employee--will also make it unusable.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it. I guess it's a matter of words and it might dissolve our question, because the way I see it, "fire hose" == "people are often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it". At least, that's what I'm trying to mean by opening yourself up to the problem of managing a fire hose of incoming resumes. The platonic ideal of a large stream of resumes that I can easily slice and dice of my own accord, in practice, doesn't exist and would be so rare as to not factor into the discussion.