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So, what are you measuring? I don't get it. You made offers mostly to people with few typos in their resume. Is this evidence that people with few typos are goo

by RogerL 13y ago

So, what are you measuring? I don't get it. You made offers mostly to people with few typos in their resume. Is this evidence that people with few typos are good, or evidence that you have some kind of bias against resumes with typos? I find the action words particularly disturbing. Every resume that crosses my desk has people that 'drove' a 'process', and they 'innovated', and so on. Buzzword crap. I'd bet my company on somebody that "implement an image algorithm" (all bad words apparently) over somebody that "enabled client connectivity" any day (all good words). And what is the actual relevance of worked for a big company? Again, I suspect bias on your part. Explain how working for Microsoft is a good predictor for how a person will perform in a 10 person startup?

itsdrewmiller 13y ago
There's a difference between action buzzwords and clear explanations of what you did. "Drove a process to innovate that led to massive KPI improvements" is very buzzwordy but not at all clear. :-) If anything I think bias would lead to lower-than-expected scores, as more resumes would end up in the "to interview" pool. But it would be good to validate this against the rejected resumes. I doubt most of the y combinator startups count as "big" companies, and he said he included all of them. He was trying to model "successfully held down a high-expectations technical job" and it seems like he chose a reasonably good heuristic.
leeny 13y ago
Good questions. 1. So, once someone was "in" (as in, they got to interview stage), we didn't consider any of these factors. Everything after getting into the interview process was purely about interview performance. As it happened, people we made offers to tended to have less typos than people we didn't. 2. Keep in mind that these action words were words that showed up a lot on resumes of people we made offers to and not a lot on resumes of people we didn't make offers to. We didn't look for those words, and again, as with the previous point, once someone was in the interview process, how they worded things on their resume wasn't a factor. This is something I observed when counting word frequencies after the fact. 3. It's not about company size. I looked at where people who were applying to TrialPay were coming from, and of those companies, I chose the ones that are known for having a high hiring bar independent of company size. In addition to some of the big guys, Y Combinator companies were also on the list.

by RogerL 13y ago

itsdrewmiller 13y ago

There's a difference between action buzzwords and clear explanations of what you did. "Drove a process to innovate that led to massive KPI improvements" is very buzzwordy but not at all clear. :-) If anything I think bias would lead to lower-than-expected scores, as more resumes would end up in the "to interview" pool. But it would be good to validate this against the rejected resumes. I doubt most of the y combinator startups count as "big" companies, and he said he included all of them. He was trying to model "successfully held down a high-expectations technical job" and it seems like he chose a reasonably good heuristic.

leeny 13y ago

Good questions. 1. So, once someone was "in" (as in, they got to interview stage), we didn't consider any of these factors. Everything after getting into the interview process was purely about interview performance. As it happened, people we made offers to tended to have less typos than people we didn't. 2. Keep in mind that these action words were words that showed up a lot on resumes of people we made offers to and not a lot on resumes of people we didn't make offers to. We didn't look for those words, and again, as with the previous point, once someone was in the interview process, how they worded things on their resume wasn't a factor. This is something I observed when counting word frequencies after the fact. 3. It's not about company size. I looked at where people who were applying to TrialPay were coming from, and of those companies, I chose the ones that are known for having a high hiring bar independent of company size. In addition to some of the big guys, Y Combinator companies were also on the list.