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100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes after submission that claims "after car

100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes after submission that claims "after careful consideration..." then of course I'm not going to spend any more time than that applying to any jobs anymore. Prove a human actually took the time to review my resume and I'll actually apply to your company like a human.

maccard 2y ago
If I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute writing each person a personalised no sorry, that’s 20% of my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually reviewing the resume). I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written). Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.
- tombert 2y ago
  I don't assume it "wasn't looked at", but I absolutely do think that a lot of the time it "wasn't understood" because the recruiters reading it only have very simply "keyword lookup" ability, instead of actually reading the resume. I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters". A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME." Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
  - maccard 2y ago
    > but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it. If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer time spent on screening alone. That’s not a good use of time when most of the resumes are a straight no. I’m assuming your writing style is different in professional environments, but if it’s not, and I saw even like 10% of the snark you’ve put here, I’d instantly dismiss you unless we were hiring for a principal into fellowship IC role and you were a 100% match. If you’re writing your resume to be read by software engineers or sysadmins, you’re writing for the wrong audience. That’s not their fault for being “incompetent”, it’s yours.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I don’t really put any snark into my resume, so I can’t tell you how successful that would be. I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of. I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.
- mjevans 2y ago
  Maybe it is time for a set of unions or guilds to do that certification for you.
  - ddalex 2y ago
    This. Just as doctors or lawyers or civil engineers can't do their jobs before being vetted by their own professional bodies it's time we do the same for software engineering.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
      If all you did was an entry level "bar exam, it'd be pretty much useless. A newly graduated CompSci student, is really just an apprentice, who may then (if they continue to work hard, and are given challenging work) go on to become a master craftsman/journeyman over the next 5/10/20 years. The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
      - ddalex 2y ago
        Doctors go through residency after passing their exams, we should have the same for engineers. Civil engineers have layers of seniority and designs of junior engineers have to be reviewed and approved by senior engineers, we should have the same.
salomon812 2y ago
God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well. Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
- Aurornis 2y ago
  I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first. A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit. So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback. If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.
  - resonious 2y ago
    I've also seen the "your feedback is wrong" pushback. Like... do they expect me to say "oh woops my bad. actually here's an offer"?
    - tombert 2y ago
      I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has happened a few times. I've been given technical questions in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer pretty much tells me that I'm wrong. For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up. I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?" The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants. So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent." We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks". Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.
Aurornis 2y ago
> 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing. When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.
- icedrift 2y ago
  I think their main complaint (or at least mine would be) is the laziness in many companies recruitment strategies. As an applicant in the software space I used to only apply to roles where I fit 70% or more of the qualifications but there is no difference in how often I get an interview compared to blindly applying to anything in the web space. I have 0 incentive to take the time to only apply to jobs I'm qualified for. This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
- easterncalculus 2y ago
  >When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application. Then why not send the automated responses (or nothing) to the obvious spam appliers and save the feedback for the clearly more legitimate applications? If the argument is that so few applications are legit, then it should be proportionally few emails to send. Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.
robocat 2y ago
The weird part is that your response to being ignored as a unique person is to treat companies as though they are all exactly the same. The relationship is not assymetrical. I also wonder whether the signals we interpret from the application process have much correlation with whether the job is actually worthwhile?

maccard 2y ago

If I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute writing each person a personalised no sorry, that’s 20% of my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually reviewing the resume). I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written). Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.

tombert 2y ago
I don't assume it "wasn't looked at", but I absolutely do think that a lot of the time it "wasn't understood" because the recruiters reading it only have very simply "keyword lookup" ability, instead of actually reading the resume. I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters". A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME." Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
- maccard 2y ago
  > but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it. If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer time spent on screening alone. That’s not a good use of time when most of the resumes are a straight no. I’m assuming your writing style is different in professional environments, but if it’s not, and I saw even like 10% of the snark you’ve put here, I’d instantly dismiss you unless we were hiring for a principal into fellowship IC role and you were a 100% match. If you’re writing your resume to be read by software engineers or sysadmins, you’re writing for the wrong audience. That’s not their fault for being “incompetent”, it’s yours.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I don’t really put any snark into my resume, so I can’t tell you how successful that would be. I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of. I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.
mjevans 2y ago
Maybe it is time for a set of unions or guilds to do that certification for you.
- ddalex 2y ago
  This. Just as doctors or lawyers or civil engineers can't do their jobs before being vetted by their own professional bodies it's time we do the same for software engineering.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    If all you did was an entry level "bar exam, it'd be pretty much useless. A newly graduated CompSci student, is really just an apprentice, who may then (if they continue to work hard, and are given challenging work) go on to become a master craftsman/journeyman over the next 5/10/20 years. The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
    - ddalex 2y ago
      Doctors go through residency after passing their exams, we should have the same for engineers. Civil engineers have layers of seniority and designs of junior engineers have to be reviewed and approved by senior engineers, we should have the same.

salomon812 2y ago

God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well. Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...

Aurornis 2y ago
I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first. A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit. So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback. If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.
- resonious 2y ago
  I've also seen the "your feedback is wrong" pushback. Like... do they expect me to say "oh woops my bad. actually here's an offer"?
  - tombert 2y ago
    I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has happened a few times. I've been given technical questions in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer pretty much tells me that I'm wrong. For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up. I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?" The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants. So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent." We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks". Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.

Aurornis 2y ago

> 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing. When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

icedrift 2y ago
I think their main complaint (or at least mine would be) is the laziness in many companies recruitment strategies. As an applicant in the software space I used to only apply to roles where I fit 70% or more of the qualifications but there is no difference in how often I get an interview compared to blindly applying to anything in the web space. I have 0 incentive to take the time to only apply to jobs I'm qualified for. This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
easterncalculus 2y ago
>When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application. Then why not send the automated responses (or nothing) to the obvious spam appliers and save the feedback for the clearly more legitimate applications? If the argument is that so few applications are legit, then it should be proportionally few emails to send. Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.

robocat 2y ago

The weird part is that your response to being ignored as a unique person is to treat companies as though they are all exactly the same. The relationship is not assymetrical. I also wonder whether the signals we interpret from the application process have much correlation with whether the job is actually worthwhile?