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> We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in

• thomasahle 4y ago
  >> repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only doesn’t work on us, but also hurts your chances. > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game Particularly when they started out by saying they're "looking for reasons to say yes", not for reasons to say no.
  • iamwpj 4y ago
    YES! I thought, well say "yes" to my list of technologies I'm familiar with. If you want to hear more about how I acquired those skills, you could ask...like with a process of engaging with applicants. Let's call it an interview.
• lolinder 4y ago
  > include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume Especially this one, because I do that for the human reader, not just for the machines. The point of the resume is to show that you meet the requirements for the job—asking a candidate to rephrase the job requirements in their own words actually obfuscates the parallels between their work history and your requirements, creating more work for everyone involved.
• kube-system 4y ago
  > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. If a resume just lists word soup, you’ve really given the reader no choice. What you should be doing (if you want to work somewhere where humans read resumes) is not keyword spamming, but using those key words in sentences that are also meaningful to humans.
• mtlynch 4y ago
  >It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario. At first, I disagreed with you because I assumed if Chip took the time to write this post, she must be linking it or at least making it clear from the job postings. I just checked the job postings[0, 1], and they never tell the candidate that a co-founder reads every application personally nor give any indication that they're handling applications with more care than the average company (and the average company treats candidates like garbage). So, I agree. If you don't tell candidates that you're unique in the way that you process applications, you can't expect candidates to approach you differently than they approach most employers, who reward keyword stuffing. I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell out in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every application personally.[2] [0] https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/7b38b49f-baa4-42b6-a58f-bab6532e51b9 https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/7b38b49f-baa4-42b6-a58f-bab653... [1] https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00ae4afb https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00... [2] https://tinypilotkvm.com/jobs/support-engineer https://tinypilotkvm.com/jobs/support-engineer
  • TylerE 4y ago
    Great way to filter for people who actually want to work there and aren’t just shotgunning resumes though.
    • idontpost 4y ago
      Do you think the people who play the ATS game are doing it because they don't want to work at the place they're applying to? That's a pretty specious conclusion.
      • burnished 4y ago
        No, it means they want to work but definitionally when you are sending out ad many applications as you can you stop caring about the individual qualities of a company - that comes later, when it becomes relevant.
• scott_s 4y ago
  Strange, they may have changed their text since you read it, because this is what I see: > We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. doesn’t work on us. They can even hurt when you apply to companies like us, because the resume space used for these tricks is the space you aren’t using for things that are relevant to us. Emphasis mine. They're not penalizing folks for the alphabet soup, but pointing out it's a lost opportunity when you have finite space.
  • suby 4y ago
    Yes, it looks like they've edited the article within the last three hours. Not sure what else if anything changed, but the original is still up on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20230125042620/https://huyenchip.com/2023/01/24/what-we-look-for-in-a-candidate.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230125042620/https://huyenchip... So they're apparently not counting it against someone, which is good.
• thrownawaydad 4y ago
  There is no fairness in hiring (nor anywhere else). I once saw a hiring manager pull a resume out of the stack and throw it away because it was printed on cream-colored paper. I glanced at it--it was impressive in general. Certainly a plausible hire at a place like Google. That's okay. You're not writing a resume to get hired. You're writing a resume to interest the places you'd like to work and repel the places you'd be miserable at.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    This is a good point. Unless you are desperate for a job, you can be strategic. You could even list things that are a turn off for you. Companies that bin your CV because of honesty and trying to get a good fit are probably not a good fit. Unless you are going against an entire culture, for example you want Fridays off but applying to high frequency trading companies.
    • red-iron-pine 4y ago
      "he wants Saturdays off? hard pass" - fintech hiring manager
• cbhl 4y ago
  My view of this: you're playing the wrong game. "Know your audience." If you're applying to megacorps, fine, optimize for searching in a resume database. An early/mid-stage startup doesn't want to select for people who have megacorp offers; that's a waste of time. Once upon a time I knew of a college job board that required resumes to be uploaded in HTML. I heard of multiple startups that would simply View Source and check if the resume's HTML appeared handwritten or if it contained the tell-tale meta tags set by Microsoft Word when it exports HTML. (Said job board was replaced by a new system that uses PDFs, sadly.)
  • isametry 4y ago
    Was it explicitly said that the HTML needs to be handwritten? Because otherwise, I don’t really see the point of that approach. People using whatever tools allow them to produce an adequate result in an efficient manner, that’s a good thing. For some people, that tool might be Microsoft Word. If the specification said “use HTML format” and the application was indeed in HTML, I don’t see a problem.
    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
      I was first introduced to HTML in high school when I didn’t have a Microsoft Office license. That meant that I actually did the opposite for writing assignments and hand-wrote my HTML document to print from a browser. Not to take away from your point in any way. This discussion just reminded me of that and I realized the irony.
    • PeterisP 4y ago
      The lack of specification is likely intentional there - apparently they're not trying to distinguish between people who can or can't follow a spec; but rather they observe that for some people the obvious or default or simply easiest way to get a bunch of text in HTML would be to write it in Word and press 'export', and for other people the obvious or default or simply easiest way for them to do the same would be to write HTML directly. It seems plausible that those are two quite distinct groups of people, and apparently they prefer one over the other.
  • 4y ago
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  Some people edit their resume for each job they apply to. It appears that we've stumbled across a good reason why. Remember, every hiring manager has different things they look for; and different criteria for accepting / rejecting a resume.
  • IIsi50MHz 4y ago
    Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance. Almost every time I'm given advice (by people who should know, by being SHRMs having X years experience as a hiring manager) that isn't taylored to a specific reader, I learn yet another hardline contradiction of somebody else's advice. For example, another commenter here asserted that you should use sentences (to put keywords in perspective/context), which I've heard multiple times, but I have far more often been told to use phrases and keywords because sentences take too long to read. Proponents of each seem to view it as a MUST, and auto-reject anything that looks like the other. This same pattern holds for almost every bit of résumé advice I've ever gotten. Some people even say to submit multiple different copies with different style variations "so that one might get through, while others say that if they receive more than one for the same role, they discard the candidate. ["Include $this!" | "NO! Never include $that!] There is no Win. Only "do a thing, until somebody tells you to do a different thing".
    • gwbas1c 4y ago
      > Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance. Often you can figure that out from the job description.
      • IIsi50MHz 4y ago
        Rarely. There's almost never a "Don't format/say like X; do it like Y instead." analogue. Instead, completely arbitrary rules are in play with hard disqualifiers unshared. Things like: "Every job should have at least four bullets."; "But only one page, or I chuck it"; "But-but, if it's only one page, _I_ wonder what they've been doing with their life (except new grads), and chuck it."; "Don't include more than title, company, and duration for irrelevant jobs."; "But any job without details looks like they're hiding something or didn't accomplish anything there."; "Start with a mission statement!"; "Never waste my time with a mission statement."; "ALWAYS include a cover letter, or I chuck it."; "NEVER waste my time with cover letter, or I chuck it; if it's worth saying, it should be on your résumé."; …
• renewiltord 4y ago
  Everything is just signal, strong or weak. In my experience, those who are applying to both computer-screened jobs and human-screened jobs are not suitable to work with me. It's just like if you write that you are an expert at JAVA, GIT, and Python. Java is not an acronym. Neither is git. Is it unfair that I judge someone negatively for this? Perhaps you would consider that so. For me, it's just signal. If I'm wrong repeatedly, I will have a higher hiring cost and someone will beat me in the market. I am making those choices for the business on a hundred different axes constantly. I have no problem trusting my intuition here.
  • mym1990 4y ago
    Don't worry, it sounds like you're an absolute nightmare to work with, so I doubt any of the candidates that didn't pass your filter are missing out on anything. Win win!
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      Well, I see it as us not being a match. It is good that those who don't want to work with me have all the information required to do so. I try to be as transparent as possible.
    • quadrifoliate 4y ago
      I, on the other hand, would pass this filter and highly appreciate working with someone who maintains it. Not spelling it JAVA or GIT is a minor, but important detail in an industry full of acronyms. People who miss out on small details like this are also make massive mistakes elsewhere in their work and tank the productivity and morale of their teams as a result.
      • password11 4y ago
        To be fair, misspelling "Java" as "java" or "JAVA" is both a signal about Java knowledge and a signal about understanding what's canonical English usage in the U.S. So it's somewhat biased against non native English speakers. But at the end of the day, software startups want hackers. And hackers know how to spell Java.
• ACow_Adonis 4y ago
  This seems like a strange asymmetric take. Aren't people who fill their resumes with word soup penalising people who don't play the games and instead fill their resume to actually be read, and convey actual meaningful information and projects to the reader? The discrimination is already built into the system, so if you have to discriminate, if i was hiring, i'd want to do so against the game players. At least in high skill data science-esque jobs, the ability to hire for people who aren't playing games and actually doing the task seems like a plus. and additionally, if you structure your resume in such a way, you filter for companies in such a way as to avoid the dystopian megacorps and managers who expect you to play games. that being said, I've yet to figure out a way other than networking or optimisation to reliably get past any institution big enough to have a significant HR presence professionally incapable of judging the things they're notionally hiring for. I've had the experience where I've found HR has culled resumes and chosen which ones go through to the decision maker, which is incredibly frustrating when they're by definition unqualified to be making such decisions. ps: I will read every resume I see. I despise word-soup/algorithmic/ business catchwords/someone told me to use active language resumes.
• lucb1e 4y ago
  What game? If I send someone a document, I expect them to read it. If I send them a list of repeated keywords just to rank higher in a dumb algorithm that I'm hoping they use, and it turns out it's a human now staring at a page of repeated words... I don't find it surprising that the human is not impressed. > It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is The best course of action is to make good resumes. If the scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any spot checks that it spits out only garbage. If you optimize for a computer, computer says yes, then a human opens it to see what your experience is and what to talk about in the (phone) interview, human would still see you're trying to cheat their system (which could be a good thing if you apply for a hacking company, perhaps).
  • Cheezewheel 4y ago
    > If the scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any spot checks that it spits out only garbage This is giving the companies a huge amount of credit. The problem isn't that the only spit out garbage, just that they are 'unfairly' rejecting strong resumes.
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success If you bring up the topic of attending _college_ on here, there will be at least five people who say "I make a point of never hiring college graduates, because I knew one once who was incompetent". Penalizing people who play the game is something of a sport in nerd circles.
• BeetleB 4y ago
  > It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. You are making that choice, though. Any time you make a resume, you are making choices about the profile of the one reading it. > I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario. Not interviewing a candidate is very different from "blaming".
• Apofis 4y ago
  TFA: You should be: - Making commits on github everyday for a year - Making many pull requests to popular open source projects - Show commitment! - Spent 3 years traveling the world before Stanford. Meanwhile, has no real technical commits/PRs on GitHub herself... ever. No streaks to speak of... ever. https://github.com/chiphuyen https://github.com/chiphuyen This is such an elitist and superficial article.