39 ms·

It's not beneficial to the applicant to be very specific about skills -- the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it, and had to interview him

by hapless 16y ago

It's not beneficial to the applicant to be very specific about skills -- the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it, and had to interview him to get a specific idea of his skillsets. In other words, the incentives just don't line up, so this will never happen. You could FORCE applicants to fill something out, but people would still game the system just by marking everything 777 or marking everything to a pattern determined by the job posting etc.

dekayed 16y ago
In terms of someone gaming the system, this was sort of said in a previous comment, but having a value associated with a skill sets a level of expectation. If you say you're at 777 for a skill, then it would be valid for an interviewer to ask you a very tough question on it. It doesn't resolve the fact that you shouldn't have gotten to the interview stage, but you can be thrown out earlier in the process, like during a phone screen instead of an in-person interview.
Goladus 16y ago
the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it This is most certainly not true in all cases. I don't pile my resume full of buzzwords just for the heck of it. There are only two reasons my "skills" section is not carefully organized to give an accurate impression of my level of expertise in each area. First-- sometimes it's hard to know how good at something you really are. Second-- I don't have room on the resume to differentiate between "I use django all the time and love it more than life itself and read books about it for fun on the weekends" and "I did one deep technical dive on django for 2 months, 2 years ago" and "I use django daily but mostly just make simple content and minor feature changes". You are probably already bored and I'm only on the first skill. The reality is that I have a lot of experience and have used a lot of different technologies at varying levels of skill, any of which might be relevant to an employer, but I don't have time to write a novel about my last 10 years of work experience describing every skill in the proper context. Hopefully, the summarized experience history and accomplishments will give the employer a reasonable idea about how the skillset maps to expertise and if they have any further questions, they'll make the time for an interview, phone call, or email exchange.
csel 16y ago
You need to display your skills, period. I have hired over 20 developers in the last 6 months and received over 30 resume for every 1 good resume. I did not have time to read everyone's work experience explanation either on the first run. I could only spend less than a minute on a resume. So we rely a lot of the Skills section. - Put it on a table. Include how many years you have been working on a specific skill. It will be helpful to list when was the last time you used that skill. So that is the first cut. - After going through the skills section, we look at the Employment history and what you actually did with those skills that you listed. Then you get a telephone interview and possibly invitation to an in-person interview. You are not going to get into the interview list if the HR person does not know what you are skilled at. Trust me, they are not going to use the interview as a discovery session. They don't have time for that, especially when there are other candidates who were clear in displaying their skill sets.
- hapless 16y ago
  You rely a lot on the skills section, and you have an HR person doing the initial filter. Your process is exactly what causes people to fill resumes with buzzwords. "I touched a prior version of fizzbuzz, once, at 3am" is still going to put fizzbuzz on the resume, so your HR person doesn't chuck it in the circular file. This is the kind of process that guarantees a lack of clarity on the part of the applicant.

by hapless 16y ago

dekayed 16y ago

In terms of someone gaming the system, this was sort of said in a previous comment, but having a value associated with a skill sets a level of expectation. If you say you're at 777 for a skill, then it would be valid for an interviewer to ask you a very tough question on it. It doesn't resolve the fact that you shouldn't have gotten to the interview stage, but you can be thrown out earlier in the process, like during a phone screen instead of an in-person interview.

Goladus 16y ago

the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it This is most certainly not true in all cases. I don't pile my resume full of buzzwords just for the heck of it. There are only two reasons my "skills" section is not carefully organized to give an accurate impression of my level of expertise in each area. First-- sometimes it's hard to know how good at something you really are. Second-- I don't have room on the resume to differentiate between "I use django all the time and love it more than life itself and read books about it for fun on the weekends" and "I did one deep technical dive on django for 2 months, 2 years ago" and "I use django daily but mostly just make simple content and minor feature changes". You are probably already bored and I'm only on the first skill. The reality is that I have a lot of experience and have used a lot of different technologies at varying levels of skill, any of which might be relevant to an employer, but I don't have time to write a novel about my last 10 years of work experience describing every skill in the proper context. Hopefully, the summarized experience history and accomplishments will give the employer a reasonable idea about how the skillset maps to expertise and if they have any further questions, they'll make the time for an interview, phone call, or email exchange.

csel 16y ago

You need to display your skills, period. I have hired over 20 developers in the last 6 months and received over 30 resume for every 1 good resume. I did not have time to read everyone's work experience explanation either on the first run. I could only spend less than a minute on a resume. So we rely a lot of the Skills section. - Put it on a table. Include how many years you have been working on a specific skill. It will be helpful to list when was the last time you used that skill. So that is the first cut. - After going through the skills section, we look at the Employment history and what you actually did with those skills that you listed. Then you get a telephone interview and possibly invitation to an in-person interview. You are not going to get into the interview list if the HR person does not know what you are skilled at. Trust me, they are not going to use the interview as a discovery session. They don't have time for that, especially when there are other candidates who were clear in displaying their skill sets.

hapless 16y ago
You rely a lot on the skills section, and you have an HR person doing the initial filter. Your process is exactly what causes people to fill resumes with buzzwords. "I touched a prior version of fizzbuzz, once, at 3am" is still going to put fizzbuzz on the resume, so your HR person doesn't chuck it in the circular file. This is the kind of process that guarantees a lack of clarity on the part of the applicant.