4 ms·

One of my clients (where screening CVs was one of my duties) had a different kind of fraud. On a particular week, we received a lot of CVs for a DevOps positio

One of my clients (where screening CVs was one of my duties) had a different kind of fraud. On a particular week, we received a lot of CVs for a DevOps position. They shared a few common characteristics: were sent through Indeed, allegedly from Indians who emigrated to the USA, talked about skills and duties but not achievements, and were longer than one would normally write. Additionally, they used too-low-level phrases that one would never use in the CVs, like, e.g. when describing their experience with Ansible, "use the 'file' module to copy files to and from remote systems". I.e. phrases that would appear in a course curriculum, but not in a proper CV. The final red flag for me was a phrase repeated word for word in two CVs allegedly from different people. I don't really know how to react properly to this, in order to avoid lawsuits for rejecting candidates based on nationality and other kinds of discrimination (ans I was specifically instructed about discrimination-based lawsuits as a very real risk, something that happened before). So I just told about the problem to the head of HR, marked all CVs received through Indeed on that week as highly suspect (even those that a casual reader would mark as OK), and let him deal with it. I don't know what exactly he did.

nerdix 4y ago
I've seen this a lot this year. Other red flags: Resume says they live somewhere without large immigrant populations like some random town in the Midwest. Places that aren't really tech hubs so you wouldn't expect to find many immigrant tech workers there. When you phone/video screen them. They are barely able to speak English to the point where you wonder how it's possible for them to survive in the area they claim to live in (again not areas known for large non-hispanic immigrant populations so you'd expect that a certain level of English competency is a required to function). Sometimes they take the interview in what sounds like a noisy environment. Sounds a bit like a call center. You start to wonder if there are other "candidates" doing interviews for other companies in the same vicinity. It's definitely been a time waster but I obviously will not filter resumes based on nationality which I think is morally reprehensible (not to mention the legalities that you mentioned).

nerdix 4y ago

I've seen this a lot this year. Other red flags: Resume says they live somewhere without large immigrant populations like some random town in the Midwest. Places that aren't really tech hubs so you wouldn't expect to find many immigrant tech workers there. When you phone/video screen them. They are barely able to speak English to the point where you wonder how it's possible for them to survive in the area they claim to live in (again not areas known for large non-hispanic immigrant populations so you'd expect that a certain level of English competency is a required to function). Sometimes they take the interview in what sounds like a noisy environment. Sounds a bit like a call center. You start to wonder if there are other "candidates" doing interviews for other companies in the same vicinity. It's definitely been a time waster but I obviously will not filter resumes based on nationality which I think is morally reprehensible (not to mention the legalities that you mentioned).