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Unfortunately, in today's job market, the first (seemingly only, sometimes) gate is what keywords are in your online resume/CV for the software to find, and han

Unfortunately, in today's job market, the first (seemingly only, sometimes) gate is what keywords are in your online resume/CV for the software to find, and hand to a human recruiter. And, in my experience, the human may not know much more than the grep-equivalent, since if they had those technical skills, they'd probably be doing that, not recruiting. So, yeah, making it machine readable will help. This does not really negate what you said, but is another perspective.

eropple 5y ago
Respectfully: I think this is the case if you yourself have commodity skills and don't know how to network. For folks who find themselves in this spot, the advice I've always given folks I mentor is to learn to do the networking thing and maybe pick up some stuff that's a little bit outside the norm but can be leveraged for multiplier effects in the job. (They exist! And they're usually pretty fun.) Speaking for myself, I've never gotten a job through a process either initiated by a cold email from a recruiter or from filtering through an automatic process on the HR side of things, and I have a boatload of experience and I like to say I'm pretty good at The Technical Thing. I get jobs from talking to people, and I help folks get jobs (at Mux, hi, we're hiring!) through talking to people. I got an email yesterday from a new hire who came onboard because he saw a Who's Hiring post on HN, shot me an email, and I connected him with our recruiters 'cause he sounded like he'd be a good fit. No robots involved, except the SMTP ones. This happens pretty regularly and a lot of the candidates might be ones who'd look like a bad fit for a keyword filter. There are jobs and there are people fit for jobs where keyword matching is a thing. There's also a monstrously large chunk of the industry where neither the job nor the ideal candidate can be expressed as such. So look at that, and then be that. And if you're finding walls, find the right person to talk to to help you get around those walls, because at places you want to be, people want more good folks to be there.
- chris_st 5y ago
  Good points, thanks!

eropple 5y ago

Respectfully: I think this is the case if you yourself have commodity skills and don't know how to network. For folks who find themselves in this spot, the advice I've always given folks I mentor is to learn to do the networking thing and maybe pick up some stuff that's a little bit outside the norm but can be leveraged for multiplier effects in the job. (They exist! And they're usually pretty fun.) Speaking for myself, I've never gotten a job through a process either initiated by a cold email from a recruiter or from filtering through an automatic process on the HR side of things, and I have a boatload of experience and I like to say I'm pretty good at The Technical Thing. I get jobs from talking to people, and I help folks get jobs (at Mux, hi, we're hiring!) through talking to people. I got an email yesterday from a new hire who came onboard because he saw a Who's Hiring post on HN, shot me an email, and I connected him with our recruiters 'cause he sounded like he'd be a good fit. No robots involved, except the SMTP ones. This happens pretty regularly and a lot of the candidates might be ones who'd look like a bad fit for a keyword filter. There are jobs and there are people fit for jobs where keyword matching is a thing. There's also a monstrously large chunk of the industry where neither the job nor the ideal candidate can be expressed as such. So look at that, and then be that. And if you're finding walls, find the right person to talk to to help you get around those walls, because at places you want to be, people want more good folks to be there.

chris_st 5y ago
Good points, thanks!