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>I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets at least a call from every bank out there I think that's funny. My brother works in finance, and I work in engineerin

by rm999 14y ago

>I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets at least a call from every bank out there I think that's funny. My brother works in finance, and I work in engineering. We both interview candidates and we were discussing our approaches recently. What struck us is how different our approaches are. A few key differences: * In general, his approach is based more on intuition, whereas mine is very objective. We both spend a lot of effort determining 'fit', but my technical requirements are far more specific. * Education matters a lot more to my brother. He has HR throw out resumes that aren't from an ivy or aren't from a top 7 business school. I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same. * He likes it when people put their extracurricular activities on their resume, for me it can't help you but could be a negative. Basically, my brother wants smart, hard-working, interesting people. I want someone who does a high quality job, doesn't need hand-holding to get up to speed, and is not a jerk to other people in the company. The guy's cover letter wouldn't impress me much, but my brother would probably love it.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I'm interested in what you say about extracurricular activities. I can certainly agree that in most cases they are a waste of space "I like music, movies and videogames". Surely though there would be some extracurriculars that might impress you? Contributions to a high profile open source projects , doing something that requires good organisation/people skills or just something that might tell you a bit about the person's personality? What sort of extracurriculars would you consider to be negative?
- philwelch 14y ago
  If you're applying for a dev job and you mention open source, that's not entirely extracurricular the same way playing in a bowling league might be.
- rm999 14y ago
  Yeah, I should have been clearer, I mean activities that aren't relevant to the job - working on an open source project would be relevant to me. But you are right that some things could be positives, like a leadership position in an honor society. "Snowboarding" would be neutral, whereas my brother says he considers it a positive (we both enjoy snowboarding/skiing). "President of the campus <insert political party here>" would be a negative for me, regardless of the political affiliation. My brother said he could see it as a positive or a negative, probably depending on the affiliation.
- K2h 14y ago
  I am in the process of hiring engineers and the last candidate that caught my eye, listed some pretty cool side projects outside of his core area of expertise. Learning of this made me consider: breadth of knowledge, interdisciplinary team structures, and understanding other aspects to design and review, overall - an interesting nerd/geek. Going to movies, exercising, travel - those should be left off of resumes coming to me. Building electric cars, embedded firmware design, realtime control - those hobbies get me to notice you - especially when they are outside your discipline.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same. I can't see how either of those things is even slightly relevant, at least in isolation. The school someone chooses may reflect a great many factors, and it's entirely possible someone went to Midwest Tennessee State Agricultural and Technical College instead of Harvard, even if they could have been accepted by Harvard. Who knows, maybe they didn't bother applying to Harvard because they thought they couldn't afford it, or the wanted to stay close to home for family reasons, etc. GPA? Feh... how do you discriminate between the guy with the 3.8 GPA who took Underwater Basket Weaving and other throwaway classes for all his non-major electives, and the guy who took String Theory, Quantum Electrodynamics and Abstract Algebra as electives?
cometc 14y ago
What kind of extracurriculars would you actually count against someone?
- loeg 14y ago
  "In my free time, I enjoy huffing paint, freebasing coke, and shooting heroin while driving along Interstate 5 at twice the legal limit. I also enjoy canoeing."
goatforce5 14y ago
> I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?
- rayiner 14y ago
  School is a filter you apply before you take the effort to figure out whether someone is a "good candidate." The uphill battle for people from no-name schools is to give hiring managers an alternative reason to put in that effort. That seems to be exactly what this kid did. He knew he wouldn't get past the hiring filter, so he went out of his way to make a contact in real life and then follow up with an eye-catching e-mail.
  - goatforce5 14y ago
    I can see that if you were getting dozens or hundreds of applications for a role you'd have to be pretty brutal about who to cut before you even spoke to them. I've never had that luxury, though. Any job i've been involved with advertising has had trouble attracting many applicants at all.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Goldman receives about 10,000 job applications per year (disproportionately for junior analysts). McKinsey receives about 100,000 per year.
      - FireBeyond 14y ago
        "McKinsey receives about 100,000 per year." Citation? That's highly dubious. There are 111.5M adults in the US between age 22 and 55. Of those, 64.9% are considered "participating" in the labor force. That brings us to 72.4M. Of those, 61% are considered "blue collar", i.e. manual labor. It's fairly safe to assume McKinsey isn't attracting that subset. We're now down at 28M. Without further subdivision, I'm fairly comfortable in feeling skeptical that one in every 280 white collar workers in the US applies for a job with McKinsey every year.
juiceandjuice 14y ago
I'd argue your brothers approach is just as valid as yours for either industry. You both hire for "cultural fit", just your ideas of what "culture" is differs.
bencpeters 14y ago
I was with you until the extracirricular comment. I can see how some extracirriculars are irrelevant for an engineering job, but I think that it's important to remember that you're hiring a person, not a machine. For many people, extracirricular activities are one of the best windows into their personality that you're likely to get in the typical job application materials. At their best, they can give you an impression of what makes that candidate tick - what have they prioritized with their time and attention outside of the traditional work/school arenas of life (which often are a lot more prescribed)? What have they done/built of their own volition rather than for an assignment? (perhaps outside of the field of this job) Extracirriculars certainly aren't everything, but to say that they are either only neutral or negative seems to me to be willfully ignoring one of the most important human characteristics of a candidate - and in some cases might prioritize candidates who have followed a lot of directions but rarely become truly passionate about something independently over someone who has devoted significant time and energy to something else.
sliverstorm 14y ago
This is not surprising. Unless I'm way out of touch with modern finance, it would be much more difficult to objectively measure a candidate for a finance position than for an engineering position.

by rm999 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago

I'm interested in what you say about extracurricular activities. I can certainly agree that in most cases they are a waste of space "I like music, movies and videogames". Surely though there would be some extracurriculars that might impress you? Contributions to a high profile open source projects , doing something that requires good organisation/people skills or just something that might tell you a bit about the person's personality? What sort of extracurriculars would you consider to be negative?

philwelch 14y ago
If you're applying for a dev job and you mention open source, that's not entirely extracurricular the same way playing in a bowling league might be.
rm999 14y ago
Yeah, I should have been clearer, I mean activities that aren't relevant to the job - working on an open source project would be relevant to me. But you are right that some things could be positives, like a leadership position in an honor society. "Snowboarding" would be neutral, whereas my brother says he considers it a positive (we both enjoy snowboarding/skiing). "President of the campus <insert political party here>" would be a negative for me, regardless of the political affiliation. My brother said he could see it as a positive or a negative, probably depending on the affiliation.
K2h 14y ago
I am in the process of hiring engineers and the last candidate that caught my eye, listed some pretty cool side projects outside of his core area of expertise. Learning of this made me consider: breadth of knowledge, interdisciplinary team structures, and understanding other aspects to design and review, overall - an interesting nerd/geek. Going to movies, exercising, travel - those should be left off of resumes coming to me. Building electric cars, embedded firmware design, realtime control - those hobbies get me to notice you - especially when they are outside your discipline.
mindcrime 14y ago
I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same. I can't see how either of those things is even slightly relevant, at least in isolation. The school someone chooses may reflect a great many factors, and it's entirely possible someone went to Midwest Tennessee State Agricultural and Technical College instead of Harvard, even if they could have been accepted by Harvard. Who knows, maybe they didn't bother applying to Harvard because they thought they couldn't afford it, or the wanted to stay close to home for family reasons, etc. GPA? Feh... how do you discriminate between the guy with the 3.8 GPA who took Underwater Basket Weaving and other throwaway classes for all his non-major electives, and the guy who took String Theory, Quantum Electrodynamics and Abstract Algebra as electives?

cometc 14y ago

What kind of extracurriculars would you actually count against someone?

loeg 14y ago
"In my free time, I enjoy huffing paint, freebasing coke, and shooting heroin while driving along Interstate 5 at twice the legal limit. I also enjoy canoeing."

goatforce5 14y ago

> I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?

rayiner 14y ago
School is a filter you apply before you take the effort to figure out whether someone is a "good candidate." The uphill battle for people from no-name schools is to give hiring managers an alternative reason to put in that effort. That seems to be exactly what this kid did. He knew he wouldn't get past the hiring filter, so he went out of his way to make a contact in real life and then follow up with an eye-catching e-mail.
- goatforce5 14y ago
  I can see that if you were getting dozens or hundreds of applications for a role you'd have to be pretty brutal about who to cut before you even spoke to them. I've never had that luxury, though. Any job i've been involved with advertising has had trouble attracting many applicants at all.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Goldman receives about 10,000 job applications per year (disproportionately for junior analysts). McKinsey receives about 100,000 per year.
    - FireBeyond 14y ago
      "McKinsey receives about 100,000 per year." Citation? That's highly dubious. There are 111.5M adults in the US between age 22 and 55. Of those, 64.9% are considered "participating" in the labor force. That brings us to 72.4M. Of those, 61% are considered "blue collar", i.e. manual labor. It's fairly safe to assume McKinsey isn't attracting that subset. We're now down at 28M. Without further subdivision, I'm fairly comfortable in feeling skeptical that one in every 280 white collar workers in the US applies for a job with McKinsey every year.

juiceandjuice 14y ago

I'd argue your brothers approach is just as valid as yours for either industry. You both hire for "cultural fit", just your ideas of what "culture" is differs.

bencpeters 14y ago

I was with you until the extracirricular comment. I can see how some extracirriculars are irrelevant for an engineering job, but I think that it's important to remember that you're hiring a person, not a machine. For many people, extracirricular activities are one of the best windows into their personality that you're likely to get in the typical job application materials. At their best, they can give you an impression of what makes that candidate tick - what have they prioritized with their time and attention outside of the traditional work/school arenas of life (which often are a lot more prescribed)? What have they done/built of their own volition rather than for an assignment? (perhaps outside of the field of this job) Extracirriculars certainly aren't everything, but to say that they are either only neutral or negative seems to me to be willfully ignoring one of the most important human characteristics of a candidate - and in some cases might prioritize candidates who have followed a lot of directions but rarely become truly passionate about something independently over someone who has devoted significant time and energy to something else.

sliverstorm 14y ago

This is not surprising. Unless I'm way out of touch with modern finance, it would be much more difficult to objectively measure a candidate for a finance position than for an engineering position.