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I came close to rejecting an interview with a company after a recruiter pushed back my resume, and I'll tell you why: What I saw was either a noticeable discre

by iamdave 14y ago

I came close to rejecting an interview with a company after a recruiter pushed back my resume, and I'll tell you why: What I saw was either a noticeable discrepancy in adequately communicating to the recruiter (who for full disclosure, has the title: "Technical Recruiter" in their email signature) what they wanted out of a candidate for the role, the hiring manager not having any actual understanding of what the role entails, the recruiter greatly misunderstanding the intentions and requirements from the hiring manager -OR- a devastating combination of all three. I say this, because the recruiter rejected my resume twice for a role that I am highly interested in based on the notion that I did not adequately explain my experience with text files and Microsoft Excel. Now, if you're a technical recruiter, hiring for a data analyst position and you make a point of looking at a resume that lists database administration experience, modeling, forecasting and technical analysis of clearing house data and fail to forward a resume for a job that would entail all three because I didn't say in clear terms "I used Notepad.exe and excel.exe" something is very, critically and fundamentally wrong with your recruiting process. That would be like asking a nuclear trained submarine electrician with 14 years experiance, 6 in the service field, with things like programming multigenerator plc control systems, can you show me more experience on wiring?

Tangaroa 14y ago
Maybe the recruiter was looking for somebody who used a specific tool rather than someone who knows the fundamentals and could use any tool. In the early 00's, I was turned down from a web job after they found out in the interview that I developed web sites using notepad, vim, and text files instead of Dreamweaver. The same thing might have happened to you.
- iamdave 14y ago
  If it turns out to be the case, I'll still go to the interview but never work with that recruiter again. We've reached a point in tech now where processes are (nearly) tool agnostic; and to focus on that given the context of the resume (which the role based on my experience in the role with other companies), this is especially true. I don't need to rely on notepad to manipulate CSV data, I can easily use Excel, Sublime or any other tool that can open a comma separated file. So I'm going to softly reject the notion that this recruiter was looking for someone who uses a specific tool. With the experience you mentioned, I can absolutely see why they'd want a certain toolset because perhaps their internal development lifecycle relies on features not present elsewhere. If that's the case with a recruiter, it's entirely their job and responsibility to their candidates to find this out and outline it in a job post to explain this without inundating interested prospects with tool-speak. This could have easily been accomplished, but it wasn't.

by iamdave 14y ago

Tangaroa 14y ago

Maybe the recruiter was looking for somebody who used a specific tool rather than someone who knows the fundamentals and could use any tool. In the early 00's, I was turned down from a web job after they found out in the interview that I developed web sites using notepad, vim, and text files instead of Dreamweaver. The same thing might have happened to you.

iamdave 14y ago
If it turns out to be the case, I'll still go to the interview but never work with that recruiter again. We've reached a point in tech now where processes are (nearly) tool agnostic; and to focus on that given the context of the resume (which the role based on my experience in the role with other companies), this is especially true. I don't need to rely on notepad to manipulate CSV data, I can easily use Excel, Sublime or any other tool that can open a comma separated file. So I'm going to softly reject the notion that this recruiter was looking for someone who uses a specific tool. With the experience you mentioned, I can absolutely see why they'd want a certain toolset because perhaps their internal development lifecycle relies on features not present elsewhere. If that's the case with a recruiter, it's entirely their job and responsibility to their candidates to find this out and outline it in a job post to explain this without inundating interested prospects with tool-speak. This could have easily been accomplished, but it wasn't.