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You’re going to miss a lot of talent by reading too much into peoples’ resumes. There are dozens of possible explanations for any given bullet point that range

by cle 6y ago

You’re going to miss a lot of talent by reading too much into peoples’ resumes. There are dozens of possible explanations for any given bullet point that range from horrible to excellent. Trying to draw too many conclusions from a resume isn’t all that different from reading tea leaves.

lmeyerov 6y ago
yep. it's a negative suggesting multiple potential issues: political/misdirecting, lacking positives that they could have instead highlighted, awareness+communication issues where they didn't realize the mistake, etc. none of those may be true, and even some they are, not matter for the role, so you're right, can be fine. but in a startup scenario.. there's less room for hiring mistakes than in a bigco, so I wouldn't just ignore. I've definitely passed on folks after catching lies in their CV - trust is a pretty basic ingredient before asking someone to own something. overclaiming here isn't a 100% lie, but it is a warning sign on issues like the above that are worth understanding.
fpig 6y ago
Well the opinion you form of a candidate is based on a combination of multiple things. Also, in my experience, the candidates whose resumes contain questionable/silly things rarely turn out to be great; there is a negative correlation between questionable/silly stuff in the resume and quality. None of the top tier people I've interviewed (the kind where you start thinking "this guy should be interviewing me" during the interview, let's say I've had 5-10 of those) had anything questionable or silly in their resume, and for all of them I was sure the person was going to easily pass the interview based on just reading their resume. This correlation is in fact quite strong in my experience - I can't remember exactly, but I feel like the best candidates I've had who've had anything questionable in their resume were mediocre at best. Note: just simply having a low-effort resume doesn't count as "questionable" here, I've had low effort resumes where the applicants turned out to be pretty great. Of course, that doesn't mean you should write a low-effort resume - it reduces your chances of getting an interview in the first place. People should just write honest, informative resumes. It's not really that hard to do as long as you're not thinking about how to manipulate the person reading the resume.

by cle 6y ago

lmeyerov 6y ago

yep. it's a negative suggesting multiple potential issues: political/misdirecting, lacking positives that they could have instead highlighted, awareness+communication issues where they didn't realize the mistake, etc. none of those may be true, and even some they are, not matter for the role, so you're right, can be fine. but in a startup scenario.. there's less room for hiring mistakes than in a bigco, so I wouldn't just ignore. I've definitely passed on folks after catching lies in their CV - trust is a pretty basic ingredient before asking someone to own something. overclaiming here isn't a 100% lie, but it is a warning sign on issues like the above that are worth understanding.

fpig 6y ago

Well the opinion you form of a candidate is based on a combination of multiple things. Also, in my experience, the candidates whose resumes contain questionable/silly things rarely turn out to be great; there is a negative correlation between questionable/silly stuff in the resume and quality. None of the top tier people I've interviewed (the kind where you start thinking "this guy should be interviewing me" during the interview, let's say I've had 5-10 of those) had anything questionable or silly in their resume, and for all of them I was sure the person was going to easily pass the interview based on just reading their resume. This correlation is in fact quite strong in my experience - I can't remember exactly, but I feel like the best candidates I've had who've had anything questionable in their resume were mediocre at best. Note: just simply having a low-effort resume doesn't count as "questionable" here, I've had low effort resumes where the applicants turned out to be pretty great. Of course, that doesn't mean you should write a low-effort resume - it reduces your chances of getting an interview in the first place. People should just write honest, informative resumes. It's not really that hard to do as long as you're not thinking about how to manipulate the person reading the resume.