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I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The cha

• carabiner 4y ago
  What evidence do you present, besides your own company, that any of that works at increasing one's chances?
• mihaaly 4y ago
  > 1. Why do you want to take this role? > 2. Why are you a good fit for this role? These are the two most useless things to ask from yourself. You know almost nothing reliable about the role - except when have real insights from earlier, but that is the priority line, not in scope here with open competition of unknown persons - at the stage of interviewing apart from what is put into pompous public descriptions of the company and the role designed to amaze (basicly self praise, overstatements, no negatives, sometimes misdirections). Only broad scopes yet. Also you will only have chance knowing if you are fit after some discussion not before even the first contact! Come on! And that is only a chance knowing some, you will only know the culture, the procedures, the infrastructure, the mentality, the professionalism, basicly everything important about the organization affecting your fit after the first couple of months working there. Then you could determine if you are fit or not! Not at the submission, please! Be honest to yourself and to your future colleague! Good employers know this, they experience it from the other side (testing an employee fit takes time in action, and several times they fail predicting it). Also people can and have to form themselves into the role, no one born fit. Pretending to know the answers already when there could be none yet either shows a will to bullshit or being clueless. None of which are desirable (in most cases, bullshiting is useful for some organizations, of course). What are the honest and reliable answers here? (in generic case, not for those through backdoors) 1. I need to work for money pretty soon and you just have this open role which I think I could fulfill some way. 2. No chance knowing that at this stage however on the surface and based on both of our public history and things we project about orselves the chances are good. No way standing out by pretending along such vague or obvious questions, that is basically the generic approach at this elimination stage what everyone is doing. I straight up refuse writing childish essays called cover letter too, ranting about how good fit I am and how thrilled I am applying to this specific role and specific organization happened to have open position when I happened to look for jobs, what a great coincidence and life purpose! I send either nothing, empty page (when the submission system tries to enforce it), or contextual facts about the application. Role relevant facts are already in the CV/Resume. We could talk about intentions and fit in person, not through robotic HR elimnators. If this is no good for the employer then we are definitely no fit.
• aftergibson 4y ago
  And step 1 is precisely the hoop-jumping nonsense ChatGPT is automating. Look forward to all candidates providing a resume and a letter generated from "ChatGPT, write a business-y sounding letter that shows my passion for this AI for dogs startup".
• the_only_law 4y ago
  I guess I need to get better at lying.
• layer8 4y ago
  > are truly inspired by your vision. That sounds about as genuine as it is grammatically correct.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  This attitude is well suited to an employers market in which you need to profess your love for the job and company as part of your job application. A pity the market has turned back this direction. It’s usually accompanied by an employer “looking for someone who loves the opportunity enough to go through our 12 week, 9 interview, 1 whiteboard, 2 coding test process which usually ends in veto and ghosting”. Like telling a girl/guy you love them before first date.
  • leipert 4y ago
    I get your point. But when you go through hundreds of applications for a single role, the ones with a cover letter do stand out. Not that I would only hire if you had a cover letter, but it still stands out. One hand folks complain about automatic scanning and rejection based on just the CVs and here we are complaining about the one instrument, a job seeker has, to express interest in the company. To go with your date analogy, a cover letter might not need to be a love declaration, but maybe a message that looked at the other’s profile rather than just “what’s up”.
    • ehutch79 4y ago
      It’s not the cover letter that’s really the problem here. It’s the cult like exuberance that seems to be demands by GP and sibling comments.
      • version_five 4y ago
        I didn't see any cult like exuberance. I used to hire and the "cover letter" criteria I had was basically looking for some hint they were deliberately applying for this job because it interested them. That's what I get from the OP. It's not about looking for someone who's pretending they've found their life's passion. It's about preferring people who (hopefully honestly) indicate this would be something they'd want to do because of some fit between them and the job. That's not a burdensome, not cultish requirement. As an aside, I saw a cool job not long ago where they wanted your application email to have the subject line "$demonym reporting for duty", where $demonym is the cutesy name, like metamate that employees were supposed to call themselves. That is cultish, and puts me off applying way more than being asked for an sentence on why I'm a fit for the job.
• datatrashfire 4y ago
  ChatGpt I need a cover letter for a startup. Here is the plaintext contents of their website...
  • jensneuse 4y ago
    In the interview, we'll ask in the first minutes what's your opinion of what we do. ChatGPT will not get you that far. After all, what's the point of faking interest? Eventually you'll never really get the job. All you do is waste everybody's time.
    • collaborative 4y ago
      Yeah if the interview ever comes there'll be plenty of time to actually be interested
    • UncleEntity 4y ago
      > In the interview, we'll ask in the first minutes what's your opinion of what we do. You pay people for their labor. Most people view that favorably. The ones who don’t you probably don’t want to hire. Requiring people to join your cult seems a bit much imho.
      • bambataa 4y ago
        > Requiring people to join your cult seems a bit much imho. Idk, GP has maybe been… over-expressive about their opportunity, but it’s still good advice that showing an interest is going to make you stand out more. Saying “do you need code written because I can write code” says nothing. I’m getting work done on my house and the guy who’s getting the work is the one who spent a bit more time looking at my house and assessing what needs done rather than a cursory glance. Isn’t it understandable that employers want at least some engagement?
    • onion2k 4y ago
      If a candidate has written plaintext summary of your website they've probably done more research than a lot of other candidates who apply.
• chocolatkey 4y ago
  As a jaded interviewer (and interviewee) in tech, I will say this works great if you have, for example, a face-to-face meeting and you can demonstrate your interest/passion for the role, but in cover letters or similar email exchanges, you already have people spitting out those fake statements, and it's tedious to distinguish the genuine interest from the fake "I am interested in <insert company name> because you <insert what company does> and believe I am a perfect fit for this job!", especially when you factor in non-native speakers and trying to distinguish between suspicious template text and not-so-great English skills. OP's post example #1 actually highlights how you can make that template text. The amount of application gaming you have to filter out is insane sometimes.
  • gymbeaux 4y ago
    There has to be a better way. I really think TripleByte was on to something. No other profession has such a convoluted interviewing system. Imagine if doctors were expected to perform surgeries in X minutes in order to prove they were qualified for the job? Imagine if a lawyer had to prove they graduated from law school by defending a random felon in a court setting. No other profession in existence expects candidates to dance on command the way we are expected to. Why do I have to prove over and over and over and over again that I can solve fizz-buzz or some other, similar brain teaser whose solution I more or less memorized. Why can't employers look at the plethora of code-related stuff with my name attacked to it that's out there on the Internet, ask me a few questions, and conclude that yep, he in fact knows what he is doing and probably did in fact work at these places he has listed on his resume.
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      This comes up a lot and the reason doctors and lawyers don’t have to do their version of FizzBuzz is that they have strong, organized professional organizations managing their professions and providing a credential that assures some base-level skill. If we had the equivalent of the Bar Exam, we’d only have to take it once and then skip 75% of every interview.
      • 4y ago
• looping__lui 4y ago
  Just some personal 2 Cents: I have hired quite a few people, interviewed many many and read countless CVs. In Tech, I really prefer 1 -2 pages tops in a short crisp CV; no extra text and weird sales pitch. Why? 1) Your actual experience, what you did, how your career progressed etc. matters most. That stuff goes beyond promises, wishes and dreams - but shows the sweat and tears. Github repo links etc: big plus 2) We are all humans that have a mortgage to pay, feed a family etc. I’m not disappointed or mad if people apply for a job for the money and fame. 3) I probably have yet to meet an engineer that would enjoy writing prose about why a job posting and company “were his life long dream”. I never ask why people apply for a job or switch either. Personally, I would never have had a good answer my self - because you seldom know what the actual job or culture or projects will be like.
  • smsm42 4y ago
    > why people apply for a job or switch either. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-08-17 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-08-17
    • lylejantzi3rd 4y ago
      I'm tempted to use these answers this in my next job interview, just to see what happens.
  • collaborative 4y ago
    That's because you're smart enough to look for key information and make assumptioms Most HR people prefer the 5-page, write-down-everything-you-have-done resume. I know because I have tried both routes and because of the feedback I got I have ended up maintaining 2 versions (long and short)
    • Galanwe 4y ago
      > Most HR people prefer the 5-page, write-down-everything-you-have-done resume A company where resumes are pre screened by HR is anyway a no-go. From my experience this has pretty much disappeared in 2023.
• shusaku 4y ago
  This is just more of the same thing the author was complaining about.
• csydas 4y ago
  I'll offer a counter view from my (annoyingly large) experience interviewing and hiring; I would ignore such statements on a CV at best, and depending on how much a candidate bets on this strategy, it might even work to their disadvantage. I need smart people that want to work and are willing to do that work with my team; I don't want or need someone to promote the party line, that's why we have Sales and Brand teams, I need people who for some amount of time are willing to spend their time and skills on our problem sets. Our problem sets aren't so unique, so I also want them to stick around for awhile (not forever, that's unrealistic). Finally, I need and want people that can at least be cordial with the existing team as opposed to disrupting it. If I ask my colleagues who also decide on hiring, probably they'd have different wants and needs, maybe echoing the parent post, I don't know for sure. There's what my colleagues say and then what they think when deciding. It's a crap shoot for the candidates for sure, and I'm very sympathetic to this; it's also a crap shoot for us as it means that depending on who takes the interview, a different set of criteria is being used, so it's a real risk; autocratizing isn't good either because then it means higher chances we can't evolve the team. Hiring is a real mess, and I have no good answer on making it better, just that it needs to be. The short list of problems I think are pretty universal for candidates and employers includes: - It's an inefficient and time consuming process for all - It encourages both sides to lie to each other for legal reasons and because it's the only way to get attention - It's too easy for misinformation/weak points to cloud the process with misinformation, intentionally or otherwise - Everyone has to make decisions based on incomplete and often inaccurate information - The interests of employers and candidates are set up to be at odds, even though it shouldn't be this way (salaries, benefits, demands on time/skills, emotional costs, etc) With CVs/resumes, I probably spend no more than 2-5 minutes on them, and it's usually with ctrl+f to hunt down the keywords for skills we identified would solve our problem set and to give me something to talk with the candidate about during the interview, and the interview is mostly to figure out "does this candidate actually have relevant experience here or it's just keyword spamming?" I'm very lucky that at least one of our Talent Acquisition teams is quite good and their initial interviews/screenings have a higher success rate than the other TA teams, so I've come to rely on that a lot, but it's still difficult as the TA team are not technical persons, and despite their earnest interest (and KPIs) to get us in touch with good candidates, mistakes happen. I really wonder what hiring would look like if work wasn't a requirement for people to survive, that is, in a world with universal income and guaranteed living. The work still needs to be done, but the candidates in this scenario have a much different incentive since their literal livelihood doesn't depend on them getting the job. My hope is that it would mean candidates choose to apply because of their genuine interest, and the type of problems the company tries to solve suddenly become a much more competitive currency we barter with. I think some might say that it already is like that, but I think that's an incomplete understanding of how hiring has worked for a very long time. So I'm really not sure how to make it better and more efficient, and how to get past the awful situation we have now; I hope that removing the "you need this job to survive" can gain traction and make it better, but the cynic in me says this isn't likely in my life time. For the time being, what I would recommend for technical candidates is the following: 1. Be cordial with the recruiters. You don't have to suck up to them, but if you can't at least be cordial with them, I have low hopes you are going to be cordial with the people you need to work with every day. The recruiters have their guidance on what we're looking for and yes it's going to be basic and limited stuff I told them to check out; they aren't going to understand everything about our tech and work naturally, but what they're screening is the basic stuff that they can understand so that I don't have to check these basics. They want you hired also remember, because it is their job to get people hired; at least the TA teams I like are constantly advocates for candidates they think have a chance, so don't burn bridges with the persons who are sticking up for you internally† 2. Keep your CV relevant and concise. Concise doesn't mean short, write what you think we're interested in, but make it parsable. I want to be able to understand what tech you've worked with, your responsibilities regarding it, and to have some items for us to talk about. Hundreds of bullet points or listed items doesn't help me if it buries the relevant experiences for me under layers of irrelevant experiences. Length, specific words/phrases, it's not as important even for the auto-screening tools. Just take a small amount of time to make it well formatted, free of typos, and it's likely fine. Freebie CV generators are perfectly fine, and preferable to CV templates in Word or other hand rolled CVs. Length doesn't matter as we're just going to ctrl+f anyways. 3. Make it clear what problem sets you're interested in, and during the interview, ask questions so that you understand if our problem sets and day to day are among your interests. I'm usually happy to talk about our day to day pretty directly so that you have a complete picture on what you're applying if it means 4. Just be cordial during the interview; I don't need people to flatter me or the company, and I just need to see you can work with the team; I don't learn that from hearing how great the company is. † I'm fully aware that many Talent Acquisition Teams are quite awful, and many recruiters are not like I described here; nevertheless, they are often still the only advocate you'll have unless you know someone on the inside. I think most hiring managers rely heavily on their TA teams regardless of how good they are, so at least be cordial with recruiters.
• gymbeaux 4y ago
  While I am no stranger to interacting with developers who seem to only be in the industry because of how well it pays, I find your advice frustrating. My experience with startups is that they demand a lot of A) interest from the candidate immediately, before the candidate has even talked to a human, and B) attention from the candidate- but that same interest and attention is not returned to the candidate. Thinking about the startups I interviewed with in the last couple of years (all via TripleByte fwiw), I have noticed the following patterns: - The founders/cofounders think they have come up with the best idea ever, when objectively the idea is novel but garbage (usually a solution looking for a problem), and only want to hire people eager to smell their farts all day long (and probably on some nights and weekends, too). - The interview process is unnecessarily complicated, despite the supposed ahead-of-time vetting done by TripleByte (which used to tout "skip to the final interview", but in reality is "skip the computer-graded, timed Leetcode Easy brain teaser"). In the worst-case, a company had me interview with 4 different people throughout the week, give a 15-minute presentation on a coding project I worked on, and then they expected me to work nights and weekends for an entire week to "test drive" me (the irony here is that while they get an idea of what it's like to have me as an employee, I don't really get to see what it's like to work for them as a company - it's not like I am in their Slack channels or participating in meetings. - The pay isn't that great. Again, the founders are delusional, think it would be a real privilege for anyone to work for them, and seem to believe that they cannot be too selective. "Give me a candidate who has familiarity with NodeJS on the backend and [Scala/Ruby/Go/Rust] (because why not), is willing and able to work nights and weekends (but it's okay because we offer uNliMiTeD PTO), all for the generous, generous salary of $130k/year. If you don't draw parallels between these and Wundergraph, kudos, but with each of the startups I interviewed with, I could feel myself becoming more and more jaded until I just gave up. A year later I'm still at my current job, and I'm glad I stayed, but I put a lot of energy into those interviews, hours spent even before I had my first interview, just researching the company, looking at their code (if any of it was public) and coming up with thoughtful questions. Why did these four companies not want to give me a job offer? I'm not sure. It could certainly be cultural more than technical. Despite my cynical attitude now, I promise you I came into each interview with enthusiasm, respect, and genuine interest in the role. I was also sure they all knew where to find my LinkedIn, Medium, StackOverflow and Github profiles, which all give insight into my abilities and (I think) prove I enjoy writing code and building stuff, and most importantly, that I could probably handle whatever frontend-for-a-database app they were building. Let's be real, most apps aren't that complicated.
• okasaki 4y ago
  > What's the purpose of sending a CV when I have to do all the hard work? Well, you're being paid to do it, the candidates aren't.
• frrae 4y ago
  > What's the purpose of sending a CV when I have to do all the hard work? The article we are discussing here claims that there already is an asymmetry in the sense that the applicant has to put time into polishing a resume while the company does basically nothing. So, you are going even further by essentially requiring the applicant to first write an open source library in the space before they are interesting?
  • Yoric 4y ago
    Hey, I've done that :) (well, at least contributing to an open-source library in the space to get an idea of the domain while applying)
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  Resumes are the thing I look through. Cover letters are discarded before reading.
  • version_five 4y ago
    Just happened to see this. If your buying say, steel, presumably you care very little about the supplier, their story, etc. You want specs (carbon content, hardness, annealing temperature, whatever) and price. Likewise, hiring people as commodities, you don't care about the cover letter, you want to know where they went to school and want experience they have. If you're trying to hire a person as opposed to a commodity, you will care a lot less about the specs and more about the person, and want to hear their story.
    • zerr 4y ago
      You are missing the point - CV is the story. Some prefer prose, others prefer structured text. You should not penalize anyone due to their preferences of the form.
      • version_five 4y ago
        I'd be very interested to see a CV that I really felt was s story. I know it's possible to make up story to fit one, but I still see them mostly as specs rather than something that gives you a sense of the person. Otoh, I'm going to try and remember this the next time I make a CV and see if i can make it a story. If done well I can see this as a powerful way of presenting yourself. (And for clarity, I mean a real story that gives a sense of the person, not the story of some career progression)
    • surgical_fire 4y ago
      As an employee, I want my employer to see me as an employee. Because I damn sure view them as an employer. This is a good baseline for a working relationship. They can be a good employer, with good salary and decent benefits. They can treat their employees fairly, offer some okay work-life balance, etc And as an employee, I can be a good one. Always being professional and polite, striving to keep a healthy environment among the workforce, and using my skills effectively to help the business while doing my job. Seeing each other as a commodity is fine. My worst job experience was in a startup that really didn't see things this way.
• jensneuse 4y ago
  Some people mis-read this post as "showing" love to a company in the application. This is not what I meant, so I'd like to clarify this with a story. Prior to starting WunderGraph, I've worked for a Full Lifecycle API Management company. It's was my best paying and most satisfying job before cutting my salary almost half to make my startup burn as little as possible. I found this company because they had an open source codebase, written in Go. Coincidentally, I've built a library (https://github.com/wundergraph/graphql-go-tools https://github.com/wundergraph/graphql-go-tools) to build GraphQL API gateways, also written in go. At that time, they were only supporting REST. So I wrote them and offered the opportunity to add GraphQL to their API management capabilities. That was it, perfect match. Fast forward 2.5 years later and they have all sorts of powerful GraphQL API management capabilities. I think it was great for everyone involved. So it's not about loving s company or a cult or anything. It's a about finding a good match between candidate and employer, and making it super easy for the employer to "spot" that from the very beginning.
  • bm3719 4y ago
    > I've read through your website and documentation and are truly inspired by your vision It's probably more practices like this, where the prospective employee has to enthusiastically profess subservient, slavish devotion to a company in order to be considered a viable candidate. You're writing GraphQL API glue. Everyone knows you're doing it to pay the mortgage. It's not a transcendental experience. By contrary, the direction we were headed until recently made more sense. A company wanted some service provided. They'd look around and reach out to someone that likely was the best fit and contact them. For example, if I was hiring a plumber, and some guy told me he was "inspired by my vision" and sought me out by reading everything on my website about my family, I would assume he had mental health issues and certainly not hire him.
    • presentation 4y ago
      As someone with GraphQL problems I am excited by GraphQL API glue lol.
    • jt2190 4y ago
• theden 4y ago
  Not every engineer is product focused. I am myself am, but I understand that many engineers (including great ones) just like solving hard technical problems in a stack they like, the product itself is an afterthought. By presupposing some ideal type of candidate and using that as a main signal, I think you're blundering and missing out on good candidates. I see that with a lot of startups that have more ego than they ought to. >Why should I read your CV when you didn't bother skimming through my landing page, docs, or open source repository. What's the purpose of sending a CV when I have to do all the hard work? How are you doing all the hard work, and aren't you getting paid to do that work—so what do you care? The candidates have a lot more to lose, it's much easier to skim through a CV than try to grok your homepage, repo, docs etc., and perhaps the more experienced engineers know the cost-benefit analysis of wasting their time going through arbitrary hoops after being burned many times before.
• vultour 4y ago
  It's hilarious that you think people are thrilled to work for your company. You could have this attitude if you were running a non-profit or were a pioneer in something. Running a fancy CRUD app ain't that, chief. And to answer your question in a way that 99% of your applicants would like to, but your high-horse approach is stopping them: 1. To make money so I can pay for rent 2. Because I have previous experience with the tools and technologies you're using
  • presentation 4y ago
    Evidently you haven't read their landing page since it's definitely not a fancy CRUD app and as a developer of fancy CRUD apps, what they're doing does excite me (too bad I'm not looking for a job!). And given that they're an early stage company (my company is as well), I have had employees who were working as a boring day job for the comp alone, vs those who do it out of genuine interest in the space, and it excites them. Both types of employees are useful to have, but the latter are far more indispensable to me. Given a choice between either type of candidate, the latter wins every time. The mindset has to be different between "big stable megacorp" and "scrappy startup".
    • bradlys 4y ago
      Be honest. The reason you take the second candidate is because they’re easier to exploit. Jfc - I know a lot of founders personally and they’ll all say that in private. You’re online - on an anonymous forum. You’re not at risk for saying something that we all know. Stop lying.
      • sershe 4y ago
        Hmm, so let's say you are hiring a guy to build you a fence. One guy keeps talking about all the potential designs and tradeoffs and can show you what he did with each one before, and the other guy is like, whatever man, it's a fence, I'm licensed - you are only hiring the first guy because he's "easier to exploit"?
      • hnfong 4y ago
• magicalhippo 4y ago
  The company I work at is not a startup but we're small, and yeah hiring is hard. Being small, each person makes a huge impact. Someone who under-performs can be a significant net drag, not just in actual output but also in terms of opportunity cost. Fitting in with the team is paramount too as we can't shuffle people around, we're just a handful of folks. So I can completely relate to wanting to be picky. I'm not familiar with how things are normally done "over there", but here in Norway all the "how to write a job application" tips that the media writes about here every now an then includes some expert saying to go to the website, read what the company is about, read the job opening description carefully and write something relevant to that. Not unlike what you mention.
• anoplus 4y ago
  I feel like the important skill to learn is learning itself, and it becomes more and more pronounced. I think the idea of learning and adjusting to each and every company you are about to apply can be intimidating at first. The world is changing fast. Skills and tools deprecate quickly – and it is getting even faster now. It only make sense the recruiter will pay more attention to core traits such as motivation, communication, creativity and ability to learn – vs technical knowledge which is still necessary but has less weight. So having an applicant learned about your company and demonstrating why this particular match could work, could hint about the traits aforementioned.
• snozolli 4y ago
  From your link: WunderGraph is an all-in-one solution to build, integrate, deploy and monitor modern APIs. We empower developers to ship faster and with confidence. What does any of that even mean? If I'm submitting an application, it's because you listed specific skills and experience requirements and I meet them. I'm not going to {insert euphemism here} just to satisfy your ego. Your hiring approach favors bullshitters.
  • Ecstatify 4y ago
    ChatGPT to the rescue! Take all the buzzwords from the landing page and ask ChatGPT to write you a cover letter Dear [Recipient's Name], As a passionate professional who thrives on delivering fast and reliable user experiences across platforms, I am excited to apply for the [Job Title] position at Wundergraph. Your organization's commitment to providing an all-in-one solution that empowers businesses with confidence caught my attention, and I am eager to contribute to the growth and success of your team. Having worked extensively with various technologies, I have developed a reputation as a full-stack powerhouse, proficient in creating and implementing seamless solutions. I am vendor agnostic, ensuring that I can seamlessly integrate diverse technologies, regardless of the provider. This approach has led me to create products that are truly transformative, leaving no room for guesswork and providing a smooth, efficient experience for users. Throughout my career, I have focused on products and services that are trusted by clients and loved by the community. The feedback I have received for my work is a testament to my dedication to excellence and my ability to deliver exceptional results. With a "batteries included" mindset, I am always prepared to go the extra mile, ensuring that every project is executed with precision and consistency. I am particularly drawn to Wundergraph because of its emphasis on providing solutions that require no DevOps intervention. Your organization has a proven track record of producing top-quality products that transform businesses and enable them to scale effortlessly. I am confident that my skills and experience will allow me to make an immediate impact on your team. In conclusion, I am excited about the opportunity to contribute my expertise to Wundergraph as we empower businesses to thrive in an ever-changing landscape. I am confident that my experience as a full-stack powerhouse, combined with my passion for creating fast and reliable user experiences, will make me a valuable asset to your team. Thank you for considering my application. I am looking forward to the opportunity to further discuss my qualifications with you and explore how my expertise can contribute to Wundergraph's continued success.
• Uptrenda 4y ago
  I don't really agree. If a person has the skills to solve a companies problems then that should be everything required. Why do you expect people to have to jump through hoops to fake enthusiasm? The reality is software engineers have a million ideas they would rather be working on than a day job. Most people don't work jobs because they want to. They do it to earn a pay check to pay bills. If someone can do high quality relevant work that's all that should be needed.
• sph 4y ago
  > 1. Why do you want to take this role? > 2. Why are you a good fit for this role? "I need someone to pay me a salary so I can make rent. I have valuable skills that match the position, but working for you is not the dream of my life. I will probably quit after a few years if the project is boring or I find a better paying opportunity." There have been times I was really passionate for a company, and it shows in my cover letters. But when you're looking for a job and are considering hundreds of positions, I have no interest in writing some bullshit story how I have been dreaming of working there since childhood for every single company I am applying for, especially if they're unknown or have limited public presence. And it is hilarious, sad, and mental that companies expect prospective candidates to lie and/or debase themselves like that. Should I ask any plumber when I have a leak under my sink to tell me why they think they are a good fit for the role, and where do they see themselves in 5 years? I'm not looking for charity, I am very good at my job, I can create value and improve your product, how is this not enough? (I know I am looking for contract work these days, and being so outspoken will hurt my chances, but honestly this has to be said. I do not like lying, nor spending 3 hours becoming passionate about your company, just to fall through the cracks and not even get a rejection letter. You need work done, I am good at doing it, let's talk.)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Yep. "Fit" means hitting many axises, especially efficient results. Cover letter and selective resume emphasis tailoring are targeted product marketing. Candidate should research the company and possibly the career of the interviewer(s). Candidate should have a 45s elevator pitch on why they should be hired. Be prepared and demonstrate unique and essential usefulness.
• bambax 4y ago
  > The question I'm asking myself is. Why should I read your CV when you didn't bother skimming through my landing page, docs, or open source repository. This can easily be turned around: why should an applicant spend time looking at the landing page or docs, when in all likelihood her application will not be read, and will be filtered out by an HR person who doesn't understand the work and whose only job is to reject the maximum amount of incoming people so that the pipe doesn't get clogged? It'd be ineffective for someone looking for a job to spend any significant amount of time on any given job ad. Job hunting is like dating. It's a numbers game. And it doesn't rely on anyone's true qualities, but on how the other party perceives those qualities. You have to make the other party desire you, either because they want to be with you, or because they convince themselves that you will make them look good.
• surgical_fire 4y ago
  Yeah, I remember the time when I had to pretend I was interested in what the company was doing. It's been almost 10 years that my default answer for the question "why do you want to work here" has been along the lines of "I don't know if I want yet. A recruiter from your company reached out, so I'm evaluating you guys during the interview too". If the market changes back to favor employers I can go back at faking interest. Them bills, they keep coming.
• henrydark 4y ago
  The flip side is a company interviewing me, and didn't open any of my relevant social profiles. Instead, I'm getting complexity questions whose solution amounts to "do a cumulative sum?"
• deleted 4y ago
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