7 ms·

Lessons from a year's worth of hiring data

50 points by slyall 13y ago

victoriap 13y ago
>>having worked at a top company matters does that mean that it makes more sense to know how top companies hire, rather than small ones, since small companies just shadow decision made by bigger ones and check for typos and grammatical mistakes?
- LaurensBER 13y ago
  To be honest, most of the top programmers or engineers that I know have terrible, terrible grammar and spelling. A number of them do not speak English as a first language but others just don't seem to care that much. Would I base my hiring decision for a new programmer or engineer on the amount of spelling mistakes in a resume? I would give it thought but I would be more interested in actual real life working experience.
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    > To be honest, most of the top programmers or engineers that I know have terrible, terrible grammar and spelling On their resume? Or just in emails they are sending out or in chat?
- CaptainDecisive 13y ago
  And further to this: which top companies? In TrialPay's case he lists his dozen elite companies. But what happens if you're hiring in a market where none of those companies have an office? For example the city I work in has a lot of large financial firms, but do those count as a "top company" on someone's CV? If you're hiring for one of those firms then probably yes, but if you're hiring for say a web startup then it wouldn't help. So the vast majority of companies hiring will have to build their own "top companies" list, based on local conditions. Which in most markets means doing your own research and getting to know local conditions, aka networking.
sneak 13y ago
> The most significant feature by far was the presence of typos, grammatical errors, or syntactic inconsistencies. I've always used attention to detail when writing (although I give a pass on grammar/spelling to some extent to non-native speakers) as a proxy for general professionalism/intelligence with relatively high accuracy. If you can't be assed to write accurately and consistently in your native language (and/or don't avail yourself of the myriad automated tools to achieve this end), how can anyone expect you to be accurate and consistent in any other endeavor? It's not like language and written communication is unimportant; indeed it may be the most important skill any information worker can have. If I were considering hiring a native speaker of English, a single homonym misuse (its/it's, effect/affect, et c.) or lack of subject-verb agreement in any pre-hire communication (emails, CV, their public-facing website, READMEs on Github) would be sufficient for a NO HIRE in my book.
- noir_lord 13y ago
  One of my old managers used throw them in the bin if they had spelling mistakes I asked him about it once and his response was "If they're too lazy to press F7 I don't want them working for me".
  - atwebb 13y ago
    One of the best programmers I've ever meet misspelled a core technology on his resume, 3 times, in different ways. There's always exceptions and this kind of resume triage misses them.
    - sneak 13y ago
      *met
      - atwebb 13y ago
        See! And I'm fantastc!
- BadCookie 13y ago
Peroni 13y ago
I interviewed roughly 300 people for our back-end/full-stack engineer position Q1. - Given that most companies interview less than 10% of the total number of applicants, I would love to know how one job received 3,000 applicants. Q2. - Why did you have to interview 300 people to fill one job? There is a serious flaw in that strategy. If you spent one hour with every candidate you interviewed, that works out at just under 6 weeks of back to back interviews. That's not taking into consideration the logistics involved in filtering and processing these 300. All that aside, do you not consider it to be exceptionally flawed that you had to interview 300 different people in order to find one suitable person for the job?
- CaptainDecisive 13y ago
  He is likely saying that he interviewed 300 people to fill about six engineer positions, given he states a 1-in-50 hire rate from interviews. Still, that means 500 applicants per open position which, I agree, seems high. In tech-ese, his use of the word "position" is referring to the abstract job role, rather than an actual instance of that role.
  - Peroni 13y ago
    A 1-in-50 hire rate is absolutely shocking regardless of the company size, industry, etc. Whoever is responsible for prescreening these applicants prior to being interviewed simply isn't doing their job.
    - karlmdavis 13y ago
      Not really, no. I've found resumes to be terribly poor indicators of hiring suitability, and so I end up conducting brief first-round phone screens with most at-least-slightly-suitable candidates. This correlates well with the article here, as it turns out that resumes were more useful as a writing sample assessment than a work experience assessment to this company.
      - Peroni 13y ago
cmarschner 13y ago
Nice article! Two thoughts on the issue of grammar/spelling mistakes: 1. The anecdotal argument: i know a great developer, very detail-oriented, math/stats genius, great team player, elite company background. But he's dyslexic. Let's not hope you would apply your filter there. 2. Great teams need a balance between detail-oriented and not so detail-oriented folks. I know quite a few excellent programmers who can get lost in the details. People with less focus on the details are often the more visionary ones, the ones with the big picture. Truly great people can switch between the two, but they are rare.
kriro 13y ago
It's somewhat interesting that grammar/typos etc. matter this much. It's a little hard for me to believe because I'd think "projects, projects, projects, get stuff done" trumps all. Did you adjust for native speakers vs. non-native speakers in any way? Also maybe I'm naive but why can't engineers do the HR even at big companies? Imo for knowledge workers you really can't afford to outsource HR to people that have no domain expertise.
- RougeFemme 13y ago
  At the big companies, HR doesn't handle the complete hiring process, but a good HR department can do effective pre-screening for the hiring manager. I like the fact that the OP points out that if you provide sufficient criteria to HR, they can effectively screen resumes. (The problem that I've seen - which can be avoided - is that either no criteria are given to HR or the criteria are too tight.) Why should an engineer spend time pre-screening for typos? And, if the hiring manager is adamant that the candidates must be proficient in language/methodology X, why should an engineer waste time looking at resumes that don't even mention language/methodology X? (Maybe the hiring manager shouldn't be adamant about lanauge/methodology. Maybe judgement should be used. So that's a criterion that should not be passed on HR, in that case. If it is, that's the fault of the hiring manager, not HR.) Also, a good HR department can keep you from getting into legal trouble with illegal questions/behavior.
- leeny 13y ago
  We didn't adjust for native vs. non-native speakers. Despite that, we did end up hiring several people from outside the U.S. In general, I think native and non-native speakers should be held to the same communication bar. No one is demanding perfection, but it's important to be able to get ideas across without noise. Moreover, and I think some commenters mentioned this below, a resume isn't written on the fly. Ideally, someone should be self-aware enough to know that grammar/spelling isn't their strong suit, whether they're a native speaker or not, and that should inform whether they opt to have it proofread.
tnuc 13y ago
Excellent piece. I was getting sick of reading about "cultural hiring" on HN. Finally someone has some numbers instead of trying to justify why they should only hire people who look and sound like themselves.
- myth_drannon 13y ago
  actually hiring based grammar mistakes is " cultural hiring". I assume they were not hiring immigrants based on the stats presented.
  - michaelt 13y ago
    You think immigrants can't write English correctly?
    - mason240 13y ago
      Is "people using their second or third language will make more grammatical errors than people using their primary language" really that controversial of a concept?
      - vinceguidry 13y ago
        I wouldn't so much call it controversial as I would call into question its relevance. Most immigrants I've spoken to are very aware of how hard it is to build a career when nobody can understand you. They don't come out and say it, but you get the feeling that they put a LOT of time and effort into learning how to become effective communicators in English. I would expect a foreign applicant to make fewer spelling/grammar errors because of this. The exception to this is when I find an "enclave" of foreigners all working at the same shop where the boss is foreign as well. English communication in these environments is worse than usual. But meeting random foreigners in places normally dominated by native speakers like coffee shops and bars? You don't want to know how many hours they've put into getting better at English. It will make you feel like a lazy, racist asshole.
      - qq66 13y ago
ronaldx 13y ago
Amongst applicants mentioning GPA: 30% have GPA 3.8 or higher Amongst job offers mentioning GPA: 67% have GPA 3.8 or higher Author's conclusion: GPA doesn't seem to matter Alternative conclusion: If you mention your GPA, 3.8 or higher gives you 5 times the chance of being hired. *Edited for my bad.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  Be careful with those numbers. He mentions that half the applicants didn't list a GPA. He also mentions that because of this, their are likely biases in those numbers. He makes mention of this in the comments. Basically, the data isn't clear.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    My point is that the author's conclusion is way more than a stretch.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  There are lots of strange conclusions on the article. My favorite one is that degrees don't matter, because they pre-screen better the candidates that don't have one. But maybe, my favorite should be that a study about 5 job offers had any significance. Anyway, it's very good to look at data for a change.
- phaemon 13y ago
  Unless there's a correlation between those with a GPA below 3.8 and those who made mistakes on their resume...
mswen 13y ago
Interesting results that seem to challenge some received wisdom. However, N=1! What this study tells you is the systematic relationship between resume detectable attributes and getting hired at this particular company. If this same analysis was carried out at 29 more companies we would have N=30 which is considered a small sample size. To effectively do that the author would need to put out a detailed description of methods for coding resumes and ideally a means of determining inter-rater reliability and so on. Interesting conversation starter - but please no one make any important decisions based on this.
- diminish 13y ago
  ok you avoided "the plural of anecdote is not data" :) (the rant previous days ago) The study may also simply show a correlation between unprepared/quick applications (resumes/cover letters) and well thought, well prepared more serious ones. I mean, it may simply show how serious the applicant takes the current job offer.
- mcherm 13y ago
  Depends. From the point of view of the applicant perhaps N=1 as only one company's hiring was investigated. But from the point of view of someone scanning resumes, N=300 (there were 300 applicants considered).
  - mswen 13y ago
    From the perspective of lessons learned, that is generalizable truths, one can only generalize to that company. So the reader of this article can only really say, this is highly relevant and accurate if I intend to apply for an engineering position at this particular company. Beyond that it falls into the same anecdotal category as any other advice dispensed by recruiters or HR personnel who have responsibility to screen applicants entering into the interview process. The big difference is this recruiter has gone to the trouble of actually measuring a number of factors and assumptions and can say with great confidence, this is how it works in a particular company. In that regard it is certainly more weighty than the type of blog post that says "I have been doing screening for 5 years and this is what matters to me. And, by the way it seems to correlate to hiring decisions at the back end of the process."
leeny 13y ago
Hey guys, I'm the author of the original post. Happy to answer any questions. Also, for some more discussion, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919819 (last time this piece was on HN).
ndonnellan 13y ago
Nice data! However, I'd love to understand the relationship between those attributes and quality of employee. Perhaps a government funded study where you select 100 resumes at random and hire all of them for 6 months? Piece of cake.
- leeny 13y ago
  Yeah, tracking on-the-job performance would be much more interesting than just looking at whether or not someone got an offer. I hope to be able to do this kind of study in the future with the advent of more data.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
DocSavage 13y ago
> I ran this analysis on people whom we decided to interview rather than on every applicant; roughly out 9 out of 10 applicants were screened out before the first round. Although the author acknowledges this will taint the results, it seems like a major filter especially when you are crafting rules for screening by non-engineers. For example, the results for "Offer Likelihood as a Function of Highest Degree Earned" could shift quite a bit if those with higher degrees were basically passed through the first cut. Why not run a subset of the analysis using the full set of applicants?
jonnathanson 13y ago
"As soon as you get someone who’s never been an engineer making hiring decisions, you need to set up proxies for aptitude. Because these proxies need to be easily detectable, things like a CS degree from a top school become paramount." No doubt this is true to a some extent, and perhaps even to a large one. But let's not give the HR drones too much credit here. How many of us have ever had to sift through a stack of 100 resumes or more in, say, a week or less? It's not an easy task. It's especially difficult for hiring managers, because they have day jobs to perform. They may not mean for things like "Google," or "Harvard," or "L33t CS Degree" to become proxies for our honest, thorough, intellectually rigorous analysis of every resume in the pile. But these things become a sort of shorthand. HR types seem more prone to overemphasizing the letter of the law, to putting pedigree on a pedestal, and to thinking as un-differently as possible. But given a thick stack and a few measly hours, I doubt most of us fare significantly better. If we're serious about moving toward a better hiring process, we need to start by recognizing the limitations of the resume itself as a normative tool.
- leeny 13y ago
  Author of the original post here. I agree completely and recently wrote about this problem: http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-meritocracy/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-m... TL;DR It would be awesome if candidates had the option to do a coding assignment and submit a writing sample in lieu of a traditional resume/cover letter.
riggins 13y ago
this is an extraordinary claim. stop and think about it for a second. if it's true, then whatever trait leads one to being punctilious about spelling also makes one a great engineer. forget the guy who's really good at linear algebra or can write his own compiler ... the guy who is perfect with his spelling will be the better engineer. I'd love to see more research on this because it would be really fascinating result if true.
- gaius 13y ago
  In an age where word processors highlight mistakes and offer suggestions, errors of the kind that would be caught automagically are akin to checking in code that doesn't compile. I don't really care about email (esp. if written on a phone) but a CV is, as others have said, a formal document.
xdd 13y ago
Ultimate Troll: Wrote plenty good code, frequent speaker, founder of several companies, hacker. Send resume that has grammatical errors, or syntactic inconsistencies. Turn down by technical recruiting, then post with details.
7Figures2Commas 13y ago
> Of all the companies that our applicants had on their resumes, I classified the following as elite: Amazon, Apple, Evernote, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Oracle, any Y Combinator startup, Yelp, and Zynga. I'm not sure an "elite" filter is a great filter, but it's not surprising that it is used. What is surprising is that the OP considers "any Y Combinator startup" to be an "elite" company. More than 500 companies have passed through Y Combinator and I doubt that most of them would be instantly recognizable as Y Combinator companies on a resume unless Y Combinator was mentioned. Grouping all former employees of Y Combinator startups into an "elite" category seems like it requires an unnecessarily big leap of faith on the part of the prospective employer.

50 points by slyall 13y ago

>>having worked at a top company matters does that mean that it makes more sense to know how top companies hire, rather than small ones, since small companies just shadow decision made by bigger ones and check for typos and grammatical mistakes?

LaurensBER 13y ago
To be honest, most of the top programmers or engineers that I know have terrible, terrible grammar and spelling. A number of them do not speak English as a first language but others just don't seem to care that much. Would I base my hiring decision for a new programmer or engineer on the amount of spelling mistakes in a resume? I would give it thought but I would be more interested in actual real life working experience.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  > To be honest, most of the top programmers or engineers that I know have terrible, terrible grammar and spelling On their resume? Or just in emails they are sending out or in chat?
CaptainDecisive 13y ago
And further to this: which top companies? In TrialPay's case he lists his dozen elite companies. But what happens if you're hiring in a market where none of those companies have an office? For example the city I work in has a lot of large financial firms, but do those count as a "top company" on someone's CV? If you're hiring for one of those firms then probably yes, but if you're hiring for say a web startup then it wouldn't help. So the vast majority of companies hiring will have to build their own "top companies" list, based on local conditions. Which in most markets means doing your own research and getting to know local conditions, aka networking.

sneak 13y ago

> The most significant feature by far was the presence of typos, grammatical errors, or syntactic inconsistencies. I've always used attention to detail when writing (although I give a pass on grammar/spelling to some extent to non-native speakers) as a proxy for general professionalism/intelligence with relatively high accuracy. If you can't be assed to write accurately and consistently in your native language (and/or don't avail yourself of the myriad automated tools to achieve this end), how can anyone expect you to be accurate and consistent in any other endeavor? It's not like language and written communication is unimportant; indeed it may be the most important skill any information worker can have. If I were considering hiring a native speaker of English, a single homonym misuse (its/it's, effect/affect, et c.) or lack of subject-verb agreement in any pre-hire communication (emails, CV, their public-facing website, READMEs on Github) would be sufficient for a NO HIRE in my book.

noir_lord 13y ago
One of my old managers used throw them in the bin if they had spelling mistakes I asked him about it once and his response was "If they're too lazy to press F7 I don't want them working for me".
- atwebb 13y ago
  One of the best programmers I've ever meet misspelled a core technology on his resume, 3 times, in different ways. There's always exceptions and this kind of resume triage misses them.
  - sneak 13y ago
    *met
    - atwebb 13y ago
      See! And I'm fantastc!
BadCookie 13y ago

Peroni 13y ago

I interviewed roughly 300 people for our back-end/full-stack engineer position Q1. - Given that most companies interview less than 10% of the total number of applicants, I would love to know how one job received 3,000 applicants. Q2. - Why did you have to interview 300 people to fill one job? There is a serious flaw in that strategy. If you spent one hour with every candidate you interviewed, that works out at just under 6 weeks of back to back interviews. That's not taking into consideration the logistics involved in filtering and processing these 300. All that aside, do you not consider it to be exceptionally flawed that you had to interview 300 different people in order to find one suitable person for the job?

CaptainDecisive 13y ago
He is likely saying that he interviewed 300 people to fill about six engineer positions, given he states a 1-in-50 hire rate from interviews. Still, that means 500 applicants per open position which, I agree, seems high. In tech-ese, his use of the word "position" is referring to the abstract job role, rather than an actual instance of that role.
- Peroni 13y ago
  A 1-in-50 hire rate is absolutely shocking regardless of the company size, industry, etc. Whoever is responsible for prescreening these applicants prior to being interviewed simply isn't doing their job.
  - karlmdavis 13y ago
    Not really, no. I've found resumes to be terribly poor indicators of hiring suitability, and so I end up conducting brief first-round phone screens with most at-least-slightly-suitable candidates. This correlates well with the article here, as it turns out that resumes were more useful as a writing sample assessment than a work experience assessment to this company.
    - Peroni 13y ago

cmarschner 13y ago

Nice article! Two thoughts on the issue of grammar/spelling mistakes: 1. The anecdotal argument: i know a great developer, very detail-oriented, math/stats genius, great team player, elite company background. But he's dyslexic. Let's not hope you would apply your filter there. 2. Great teams need a balance between detail-oriented and not so detail-oriented folks. I know quite a few excellent programmers who can get lost in the details. People with less focus on the details are often the more visionary ones, the ones with the big picture. Truly great people can switch between the two, but they are rare.

kriro 13y ago

It's somewhat interesting that grammar/typos etc. matter this much. It's a little hard for me to believe because I'd think "projects, projects, projects, get stuff done" trumps all. Did you adjust for native speakers vs. non-native speakers in any way? Also maybe I'm naive but why can't engineers do the HR even at big companies? Imo for knowledge workers you really can't afford to outsource HR to people that have no domain expertise.

RougeFemme 13y ago
At the big companies, HR doesn't handle the complete hiring process, but a good HR department can do effective pre-screening for the hiring manager. I like the fact that the OP points out that if you provide sufficient criteria to HR, they can effectively screen resumes. (The problem that I've seen - which can be avoided - is that either no criteria are given to HR or the criteria are too tight.) Why should an engineer spend time pre-screening for typos? And, if the hiring manager is adamant that the candidates must be proficient in language/methodology X, why should an engineer waste time looking at resumes that don't even mention language/methodology X? (Maybe the hiring manager shouldn't be adamant about lanauge/methodology. Maybe judgement should be used. So that's a criterion that should not be passed on HR, in that case. If it is, that's the fault of the hiring manager, not HR.) Also, a good HR department can keep you from getting into legal trouble with illegal questions/behavior.
leeny 13y ago
We didn't adjust for native vs. non-native speakers. Despite that, we did end up hiring several people from outside the U.S. In general, I think native and non-native speakers should be held to the same communication bar. No one is demanding perfection, but it's important to be able to get ideas across without noise. Moreover, and I think some commenters mentioned this below, a resume isn't written on the fly. Ideally, someone should be self-aware enough to know that grammar/spelling isn't their strong suit, whether they're a native speaker or not, and that should inform whether they opt to have it proofread.

tnuc 13y ago

Excellent piece. I was getting sick of reading about "cultural hiring" on HN. Finally someone has some numbers instead of trying to justify why they should only hire people who look and sound like themselves.

myth_drannon 13y ago
actually hiring based grammar mistakes is " cultural hiring". I assume they were not hiring immigrants based on the stats presented.
- michaelt 13y ago
  You think immigrants can't write English correctly?
  - mason240 13y ago
    Is "people using their second or third language will make more grammatical errors than people using their primary language" really that controversial of a concept?
    - vinceguidry 13y ago
      I wouldn't so much call it controversial as I would call into question its relevance. Most immigrants I've spoken to are very aware of how hard it is to build a career when nobody can understand you. They don't come out and say it, but you get the feeling that they put a LOT of time and effort into learning how to become effective communicators in English. I would expect a foreign applicant to make fewer spelling/grammar errors because of this. The exception to this is when I find an "enclave" of foreigners all working at the same shop where the boss is foreign as well. English communication in these environments is worse than usual. But meeting random foreigners in places normally dominated by native speakers like coffee shops and bars? You don't want to know how many hours they've put into getting better at English. It will make you feel like a lazy, racist asshole.
    - qq66 13y ago

ronaldx 13y ago

Amongst applicants mentioning GPA: 30% have GPA 3.8 or higher Amongst job offers mentioning GPA: 67% have GPA 3.8 or higher Author's conclusion: GPA doesn't seem to matter Alternative conclusion: If you mention your GPA, 3.8 or higher gives you 5 times the chance of being hired. *Edited for my bad.

jasonlotito 13y ago
Be careful with those numbers. He mentions that half the applicants didn't list a GPA. He also mentions that because of this, their are likely biases in those numbers. He makes mention of this in the comments. Basically, the data isn't clear.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  My point is that the author's conclusion is way more than a stretch.
marcosdumay 13y ago
There are lots of strange conclusions on the article. My favorite one is that degrees don't matter, because they pre-screen better the candidates that don't have one. But maybe, my favorite should be that a study about 5 job offers had any significance. Anyway, it's very good to look at data for a change.
phaemon 13y ago
Unless there's a correlation between those with a GPA below 3.8 and those who made mistakes on their resume...

mswen 13y ago

Interesting results that seem to challenge some received wisdom. However, N=1! What this study tells you is the systematic relationship between resume detectable attributes and getting hired at this particular company. If this same analysis was carried out at 29 more companies we would have N=30 which is considered a small sample size. To effectively do that the author would need to put out a detailed description of methods for coding resumes and ideally a means of determining inter-rater reliability and so on. Interesting conversation starter - but please no one make any important decisions based on this.

diminish 13y ago
ok you avoided "the plural of anecdote is not data" :) (the rant previous days ago) The study may also simply show a correlation between unprepared/quick applications (resumes/cover letters) and well thought, well prepared more serious ones. I mean, it may simply show how serious the applicant takes the current job offer.
mcherm 13y ago
Depends. From the point of view of the applicant perhaps N=1 as only one company's hiring was investigated. But from the point of view of someone scanning resumes, N=300 (there were 300 applicants considered).
- mswen 13y ago
  From the perspective of lessons learned, that is generalizable truths, one can only generalize to that company. So the reader of this article can only really say, this is highly relevant and accurate if I intend to apply for an engineering position at this particular company. Beyond that it falls into the same anecdotal category as any other advice dispensed by recruiters or HR personnel who have responsibility to screen applicants entering into the interview process. The big difference is this recruiter has gone to the trouble of actually measuring a number of factors and assumptions and can say with great confidence, this is how it works in a particular company. In that regard it is certainly more weighty than the type of blog post that says "I have been doing screening for 5 years and this is what matters to me. And, by the way it seems to correlate to hiring decisions at the back end of the process."

leeny 13y ago

Hey guys, I'm the author of the original post. Happy to answer any questions. Also, for some more discussion, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919819 (last time this piece was on HN).

ndonnellan 13y ago

Nice data! However, I'd love to understand the relationship between those attributes and quality of employee. Perhaps a government funded study where you select 100 resumes at random and hire all of them for 6 months? Piece of cake.

leeny 13y ago
Yeah, tracking on-the-job performance would be much more interesting than just looking at whether or not someone got an offer. I hope to be able to do this kind of study in the future with the advent of more data.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

DocSavage 13y ago

> I ran this analysis on people whom we decided to interview rather than on every applicant; roughly out 9 out of 10 applicants were screened out before the first round. Although the author acknowledges this will taint the results, it seems like a major filter especially when you are crafting rules for screening by non-engineers. For example, the results for "Offer Likelihood as a Function of Highest Degree Earned" could shift quite a bit if those with higher degrees were basically passed through the first cut. Why not run a subset of the analysis using the full set of applicants?

jonnathanson 13y ago

"As soon as you get someone who’s never been an engineer making hiring decisions, you need to set up proxies for aptitude. Because these proxies need to be easily detectable, things like a CS degree from a top school become paramount." No doubt this is true to a some extent, and perhaps even to a large one. But let's not give the HR drones too much credit here. How many of us have ever had to sift through a stack of 100 resumes or more in, say, a week or less? It's not an easy task. It's especially difficult for hiring managers, because they have day jobs to perform. They may not mean for things like "Google," or "Harvard," or "L33t CS Degree" to become proxies for our honest, thorough, intellectually rigorous analysis of every resume in the pile. But these things become a sort of shorthand. HR types seem more prone to overemphasizing the letter of the law, to putting pedigree on a pedestal, and to thinking as un-differently as possible. But given a thick stack and a few measly hours, I doubt most of us fare significantly better. If we're serious about moving toward a better hiring process, we need to start by recognizing the limitations of the resume itself as a normative tool.

leeny 13y ago
Author of the original post here. I agree completely and recently wrote about this problem: http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-meritocracy/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-m... TL;DR It would be awesome if candidates had the option to do a coding assignment and submit a writing sample in lieu of a traditional resume/cover letter.

riggins 13y ago

this is an extraordinary claim. stop and think about it for a second. if it's true, then whatever trait leads one to being punctilious about spelling also makes one a great engineer. forget the guy who's really good at linear algebra or can write his own compiler ... the guy who is perfect with his spelling will be the better engineer. I'd love to see more research on this because it would be really fascinating result if true.

gaius 13y ago
In an age where word processors highlight mistakes and offer suggestions, errors of the kind that would be caught automagically are akin to checking in code that doesn't compile. I don't really care about email (esp. if written on a phone) but a CV is, as others have said, a formal document.

xdd 13y ago

Ultimate Troll: Wrote plenty good code, frequent speaker, founder of several companies, hacker. Send resume that has grammatical errors, or syntactic inconsistencies. Turn down by technical recruiting, then post with details.

7Figures2Commas 13y ago

> Of all the companies that our applicants had on their resumes, I classified the following as elite: Amazon, Apple, Evernote, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Oracle, any Y Combinator startup, Yelp, and Zynga. I'm not sure an "elite" filter is a great filter, but it's not surprising that it is used. What is surprising is that the OP considers "any Y Combinator startup" to be an "elite" company. More than 500 companies have passed through Y Combinator and I doubt that most of them would be instantly recognizable as Y Combinator companies on a resume unless Y Combinator was mentioned. Grouping all former employees of Y Combinator startups into an "elite" category seems like it requires an unnecessarily big leap of faith on the part of the prospective employer.