15 ms·

Resumes suck for hiring engineers

224 points by slyall 12y ago

TTPrograms 12y ago
I would think that the other interpretation of this result is just that many engineers suck at writing resumes, which is totally plausible. In fact, one could analyze this in the current data set by looking at the total number of correct predictions versus the different resumes in the set. A well-written resume would then be one which results in correct predictions most frequently. You'd then have two dimensions for each resume - quality as judged by the author and signaling accuracy in the resume itself. I've seen resumes in all corners of that plot, so I can't say that I'd throw out the resume straight away, but it does indicate that there is some large gap between what hirers want and what candidates think they want.
- itsdrewmiller 12y ago
  What is the interpretation to which you are proposing an alternative?
  - klochner 12y ago
    That resumes are an objectively bad communication/evaluation tool.
    - itsdrewmiller 12y ago
      I think that's a stronger statement than is intended in the article - theoretically if people wrote resumes differently they could be good, but the way they are used now, they are bad. You're providing a theory as to why they are bad now, but not really contradicting anything in the article.
      - TTPrograms 12y ago
        "Resumes just aren’t that useful" "...at the end of the day, the resume is a low-signal document." "Longer-term, how engineers are filtered fundamentally needs to change." The conclusion seems to be that resumes are fundamentally flawed.
      - itsdrewmiller 12y ago
        Probably just arguing semantics at this point. I think "engineers need to all learn how to write resumes differently from how any of them do now" qualifies as a pretty fundamental change. Although I guess you really only need to get the good ones to do it. :-)
        marcosdumay 12y ago
        From my conclusions, that's also a valid take-away. Looks like it goes both ways. Companies will gain better candidates if they stopped using resumes, and engineers will land better jobs if they started creating resumes that are different from what everybody else writes.
- pekk 12y ago
  If a large number of people suck at writing resumes enough to throw off a search, the question is raised of why you are first and foremost evaluating candidates for their ability to write resumes.
- kabouseng 12y ago
  Since technical writing is part of an engineers job requirements, I would argue that an engineer incapable of writing a decent resume is already at a disadvantage.
  - eigenvector 12y ago
    Resumes are inherently hard to prepare because the requirements are often deliberately withheld. Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag, but other than basic linguistic elements it's not really a fair way to evaluate someone's technical communication skills. Some companies treat the job posting itself as a type of puzzle you're expected to guess at with your cover letter and resume. Also, a lot of job postings are terribly written, extremely vague or otherwise problematic, so it's not a one-sided problem. It's hard to know if you're meeting the employer's needs when their posting is asking for someone who could engineer a mission to Mars on their lunch break and will work for $50,000 and 1 week of vacation.
    - tempestn 12y ago
      In the intro of the article, it stated that the strongest signal of applicant quality found on resumes was the number of typos and grammatical errors. Perhaps that was an exaggeration or even a joke, but if not, I would agree that this should be a red flag, regardless of a person's qualifications. (I would similarly judge a potential employer on the quality of their job posting. I know when I write a job posting I go to a great deal of effort to make sure it reads well and reflects our company as well as possible.)
    - kabouseng 12y ago
      "Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag" I agree. The same could also be said about a companies job posting. If the job posting is "vague or problematic", it also indicates the company has no idea of what skill set they need. This has many parallels with a client not properly being able to specify his requirements. Usually if a client cannot properly specify his requirements, he also underestimate the amount of work / cost it will require to develop. The same with a job posting, if they cant properly specify a job posting, an employer also might think the job is easy or he can pay someone peanuts to do it.
- threatofrain 12y ago
  I propose an alternative or complimentary idea. That cultural inertia guides not only that employers expect the same kinds of data, but also that employees do the same. If employers wanted to, they could start the ball rolling by simply requesting for more predictive data up-front. Candidates often make specific designs to the company they are applying to. Then companies can filter these candidates out to control the load on expensive interviews. I'd also say that if a company wants an introspective hiring system, they would naturally pursue a strategy where you identify the kinds of predictors (exclusive or inclusive) you want and request them in resume or some screening test that goes with the resume.
jejfpoiejf 12y ago
>I make pretty websites for the internet. >I'm a real engineer guys!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jayhuang 12y ago
I feel like this data is a small piece of the age long debate about hiring methods and competence/success indicators. There's been a lot of data about how even people who think they are experts at finding good candidates are really no better than someone flipping a coin. How then, if the line between "strong/less strong" candidates are so blurred, does Aline draw the line between "strong/less strong" herself? Isn't the way she splits the candidates' resumes also part of the exact thing she's trying to measure? > "...then even if my criteria for whether each resume belonged to a strong candidate wasn’t perfect, the results would still be compelling"
- itsdrewmiller 12y ago
  I don't think you actually demonstrate this statement: > if the line between "strong/less strong" candidates are so blurred It is hard to tell prospectively whether someone will be a good programmer. It is not too difficult to tell retrospectively. (Any research that tries to measure competence/success indicators must be using something as its dependent variable, right?) The line you quote is specifically about the fact that resumes could be meaningful even if her competence assignments were not. Resumes seem to fail at that test as well. The biggest threat to validity would probably be that different people will be good/bad developers in different environments, and that this effect is very strong. Then each reviewer could be good at selecting for success in their own company, but they would only agree with each or with aline to the extent that their environment was similar to that of other companies or the ones that aline placed those engineers at. I am pretty comfortable rejecting this theory out of hand myself.
hw 12y ago
It's hard to gauge a person's qualities from a resume. Things like culture fit (extremely important IMO), fast thinker, quick learner - are all aspects that can't be garnered from a resume. IMO, resumes are only a decent filter for experience, and provides a baseline for the interview. There are many I've interviewed that padded their resumes and said they are experienced in something they really aren't, and there are some who dont have much experience but are smart and quick learners. Without a resume, what else can we go with when it comes to hiring? In my career, the best hires have always been from two sources: - someone i've worked with and trust before - someone who was recommended by someone i worked with and trust before
- itsdrewmiller 12y ago
  What do you think about the writing sample idea in the article? Doesn't seem crazy to me.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    Great... if you're hiring writers. Writing skill is uncorrelated with everything else. I'm a great writer. Many engineers I admire and respect are not. I've got no magic bullet. Hiring people you know is good, and I strongly recommend informal face-to-face interviews. Two of the best interviews I've ever had (one where I was the interviewer, the other where I was the interviewee) were mostly about language design, which turns out to be a really revealing topic for discovering attitudes about process, standards, and software design generally. But how to screen people in the pipeline so you can avoid interviewing everyone who applies? No idea.
    - itsdrewmiller 12y ago
      Is it actually uncorrelated with everything else? I think it's worth investigating (and I hope the addendum at the top of her article means that she will let us know how it works out!) In my experience great engineers who are bad writers definitely exist, but are more the exception than the rule.
  - hw 12y ago
fredophile 12y ago
I'm not very surprised that resumes aren't a good indicator of performance. They're real only useful as an indicator of experience. In other words they tell you about quantity and not quality. I'd say if they seem reasonable for the role then move them on to the next step of the hiring process. Every interview process that I've been involved with has had a series of increasing expensive steps designed to find specific information and weed people out as early as possible. It's also worth noting that several of the criteria people used to reject candidates in the article aren't good predictors. For example, lack of pedigree doesn't tell you much. People from a variety of backgrounds can be good or bad as coders. A good or bad pedigree can be a useful indicator.
hacknat 12y ago
>For each resume, I had a pretty good idea of how strong the engineer in question was, and I split resumes into two strength-based groups. To make this judgment call, I drew on my personal experience — most of the resumes came from candidates I placed (or tried to place) at top-tier startups. In these cases, I knew exactly how the engineer had done in technical interviews, and, more often than not, I had visibility into how they performed on the job afterwards. The remainder of resumes came from engineers I had worked with directly. Does anyone else think this is a huge caveat getting thrown into a blender of numbers? Why does this person's opinion even matter? Why should I take this at face value? I'm not trying to say resumes are a good indicator of anything, but neither is this "study".
- usaar333 12y ago
  Agreed. The study is showing how much people's views of resume X agrees with the author's full evaluation. But what I or my company consider a quality candidate may differ from the author. On another note, I've found that for recent grads, GPA, school, and major (all items on the resume) are excellent predictors of interview performance.
  - itsdrewmiller 12y ago
    It goes further than just that - the stuff about Fleiss' kappa shows that not only do these people not agree with the author; they also don't agree with each other. Maybe all development shops are so different that there is no significant correlation between success at one place and success at another, but I highly doubt it!
- apolretom 12y ago
  Thank you. This entire 'study' is nonsense because this recruiter has no idea how 'strong' these candidates really are. She only thinks she knows, just like every arrogant jerk who's ever conducted a technical interview.
  - cowls 12y ago
    Yep, nonsense in = nonsense out. This "study" is pointless.
joelgrus 12y ago
I don't see anywhere the Ockham's Razor explanation that bad candidates fudge their resumes in order to make themselves look like good candidates.
- itsdrewmiller 12y ago
  I don't think the article posits a cause for why resumes are useless - just argues that they are useless. Your guess about why is definitely a reasonable option. From a hiring manager's perspective, it doesn't matter all that much.
- pekk 12y ago
  I think it's even simpler just to observe that the way someone chooses to write and target a resume has no particular relationship to how well they would do the job.
Fede_V 12y ago
Interestingly, why didn't she do some kind of text mining/classification to try to show what features gave the highest discrimination between the two classes?
photoJ 12y ago
I am not sure how I would feel if my resume was posted here. I've already found someone I was able to quickly identify by looking at the resumes. I would have expected more discretion on the recruiters part.
- leeny 12y ago
  Aline here. I got permission from everyone whose resume I used in this experiment.
  - photoJ 12y ago
    Fair enough....
mbesto 12y ago
> As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the board, and after running the numbers, it began to look like resumes might not be a particularly effective filtering tool in the first place. Her theory - people suck at filtering because the tool they use is poor. > it may not be a matter of being good or bad at judging resumes but rather a matter of the task itself being flawed — at the end of the day, the resume is a low-signal document. Resumes suck for hiring all people. But that's not the purpose of a resume -- it's a low-signal filter to weed out the initial batch of candidates. If you treat hiring like a sales funnel (and you should), then a resume is a great way to eliminate unnecessary time for your team to assess someone's cultural fit. Expecting the resume to be high signal filter is pretty naive.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > If you treat hiring like a sales funnel (and you should), then a resume is a great way to eliminate unnecessary time for your team to assess someone's cultural fit. Where's the evidence that it is great at this? Certainly, its a basis for narrowing the set of candidates that get further review, but is it a good basis?
  - mbesto 12y ago
    Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? I was slightly perturbed by the original author as she offered no real solution.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? Where's the evidence that resumes are better than random selection among applicants into the next round, much less enough better to be a net positive given the resources that go into reviewing them?
      - mbesto 12y ago
        Huh? I think you're confusing the concept of "top of the funnel". Are you suggesting that I randomly select people to interview from a pile of resumes? What if I get a marketing person who has no software experience in the pile for a software developer job?
lowglow 12y ago
Some of the worst people I know also have the best resumes. I think they've learned to optimize where they can.
- eo3x0 12y ago
  It also works the other way around. Some of the best people I know have horrible resumes or no resume at all. Resumes are probably subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect that tends to plague software development.
moron4hire 12y ago
My own experiences with interviewing HR pre-filtered resumes bears this out, so I can't imagine what the entire firehose is like.
rezashirazian 12y ago
for anyone relating with every "engineers suck at writing resumes" comment; I've been using my stackoverflow profile as a resume and it's been working out great.
vonnik 12y ago
The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here: http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a-new-way-to-network-interview/ http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a... We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance. A study that Google released last year supports that. The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. They chose what they wanted to work on together. In a sense, we were batch processing applicants while gathering much richer information than resumes provide. Strong candidates we didn't hire, we shared in the Sequoia network. We ended up making eight interview offers (several candidates decided to work elsewhere), and we hired one engineer. The whole event was inspired by this essay: http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234 http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234
- more_original 12y ago
  This sounds like a really interesting idea. I probably takes a weekend to prepare a proper application anyway, so spending the time on a project (which may be fun even) sounds much better.
- fsniper 12y ago
  This is a good interview process for a coding gig. I am a devops engineer who is mainly a system administrator. I code but I code as a tool not as a goal. So for this kind of positions looking for coding performance does not give good indicators. Or you can not do this kind of experiment for other kinds of positions.
- yangchi 12y ago
  >The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. I see more and more companies doing this small projects type of initial screening. I like it. But time is actually an expensive cost. Suppose your candidate makes $130,000 per year, which isn't even a high salary in bay area. Then if he/she spends 15 hours on this project, then we are talking about 1000 bucks. Now that is quite a cost, isn't it? Honestly compared to a white board programming puzzle, such projects always make more sense to me. But most companies will still do white-boards during on-site after the initial project. And although I like most of those projects, even in my case, if I happen to be busy, then I do feel like they are annoying. I'd rather spend my time doing what I was busy doing, or learning new stuff, or working on my pet projects, rather than working on a project that may or may not make sense to me, just to show to other people that I can code, and I can write clean code. Let alone I happen to know some friends who just hate those projects and will never do them unless it's from their dream company. Plus, there are people who are better communicator when they talk face-to-face. Then it's really hard to say if such project is really better than white-boarding for that type of candidates. But it's still way better than those 30-minutes online coding over a phone interview. That's the one I hate most.. Even Skype interview is better than phone interview.
Moto7451 12y ago
Resumes are just a broad filter for skills and a way to find useful questions to later flesh out a candidate and their competence/experience level. It shouldn't be shocking that code samples and/or a short programming test and a phone call will tell you more about the candidate, and if they should come in for a full interview, than blind keyword bingo.
JimboOmega 12y ago
As someone trying to hire, I find myself going through resumes for the firs ttime... And honestly, my primary metric is if the word "rails" appears anywhere (It's a ruby on rails job). I might even let that go if I saw a cover letter explaining why they liked rails (but maybe don't have professional experience in it). Honestly this is a pretty low bar. And the way I've been doing it, the phone screen that follows is pretty softball. But after that, I give out the coding exercise... If you complete it, you get an in person interview for the most part. But all the rest of it - looking at resumes, the phone screen - sort of seems like a waist of time. I don't care how big a game you can talk, if you can't do the coding exercise (which, btw, is the most common outcome - they beg a couple extensions and then give up), then... oh well.
- ownagefool 12y ago
  Honestly, if hiring permenant staff for long term occupation, I probably wouldn't even require that much. If they have php, perl or python on their CV, then they'll have had the opportunity to know everything else you'll want them to know.
ddoss 12y ago
Totally agree! KeepSafe is taking this exact approach to hiring right now. https://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html https://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html
zubairq 12y ago
This article should be titled, "Resumes that suck suck for hiring engineers". Resumes that are clear help someone massively, or at the very least do not get in the way. At NemCV we have 100% success rate finding people jobs, and a CV/resume may not be everything needed to get the job, but is a bare expected minimum. Every employer no matter how they find a candidate always asks for a resume. Zubair, NemCV
jnaour 12y ago
What I feel right now is that the hiring process is more and more based on personnal branding. If you want to have a job interview in top startup you have to have a good github, smart blog posts, a good stackoverflow, a good kaggle, some certificats from coursera, some conf etc. It's a good thing for hiring process, you could judge a candidat more easely if you could read some of his code or thoughts. You could have more interesting job offers from people that actually understand what you do. The problem is that you have to spend lot of time in improving these things. Some are easy because it's natural to do some work on a open source project that you're interested in, the personnal branding thing it's just a bonus, but some other need works... I believe that in all automatic job applying process that I tried recently there were fields for linkedin, github, personnal blogs, websites etc.
- ryandrake 12y ago
  A company that relies on GitHub and blog posts will miss tons of highly-qualified candidates who don't (or cannot due to their employment agreement) work on open source and who don't spend their weekends blogging and posting to StackOverflow. Sure, I can see interesting programming side projects being a nice bonus, but it's not a replacement for a resume + technical interview.
Zenst 12y ago
Sadly one of the biggest problems I have found regarding Resumes/CV's in the IT industry and companies is the rise of HR departments who will just word filter the candidates and even remove people they deem not suitable. Even the classic case of filtering out people they deem `overqualified`, which sadly means the IT manager most often does not get to even see or known about the better candidates and ends up with a selection picked by HR people who know nothing of the work involved. I for one welcome phone interaction and tests, though not all tests perfect and found many flawed tests and errors in tests in the past. Some companies appreciate when you tell them of mistakes and others will hold it against you, though again, found HR departments if you point out a mistake will not take it onboard and take it as criticism and in a negative way and hold that against you. So for me, I do feel HR departments play too large a part in recruitment in IT than their skillsets entail. Not saying a golden solution, but I do feel that many recruitment processes have gone down hill with HR wedging themselves into the process more and more and filtering out candidates that the manager doing the recruiting, never even knows about. Though this is all based upon my experience and I'm sure others had different views. But for me, having been turned down for a job for being overqualified and case of you actually knowing the manager and he never even got to see your CV, well, sadly I know it is very true and happens.
- nguyenm 12y ago
  Yeah agree. Am trying to bootstrap a startup around crowd sourcing the interview process as a potential solution to the disconnect between recruiters and hiring managers. Could always use some more thought partners on it for the interested (see profile for my contact). Sorry, no website yet (busy on an mvp) but hopefully soon.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  "I for one welcome phone interaction and tests" Yes, but you can't call everybody that sent you a CV. RH filtering sucks, but is needed usually. Of course there are false positives and negatives Yes, RH might miss a J2EE expert for a position requiring Java experience, but these days companies search from big databases (Linkedin/Indeed) so this type of grepping is usually needed.
- 12y ago
fiatjaf 12y ago
Resumes suck for hiring anyone.
aercolino 12y ago
Many recruiters don't read resumes and many of those that do, don't understand them, be they from HR or IT depts. Arrogance, disrespect and plain unpreparedness.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Actually, from my last experience, winning the recruiters was easy, it was the company RH/Engineers was tough They're the first step in the funnel, if you can't get through them your resume usually needs fixing. And of course the interviewing flaws that are discusses several times on HN play a part as well.
iN7h33nD 12y ago
The real questions are: What would be better than sending a resume? Should the job ask for a resume as well as have every applicant submit a project somewhere, one which will be "unit tested" automatically to filter candidates? Should they just ask for the project? Should there be something other than a resume like a timed coding test or something (where the applicant needs to take half an hour and write a program to do X in the language that they will need to work in, probably something really simple)?
- nissimk 12y ago
  There's a great book which answers your first question: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Send-Resume-Other-Contrarian/dp/0786865962 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Send-Resume-Other-Contrarian/dp/0... It's a good collection of advanced marketing techniques for job searchers.
- wallflower 12y ago
  A friend of mine made it through the initial interview stages at SoundCloud. He was then given three days to build an iOS app using the SoundCloud API that showed off his experience and skill. I like that approach because three days is a nice length of time to build something you can be proud of. He was interviewing for the iOS team, of course.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Was he paid for his work? If he wasn't, he's part of the problem in hiring processes in our industry.
    - marktangotango 12y ago
      Agreed, I did a coding exercise for the Nerdery once, I epended about 8 hours on it, no one even reviewed it. Total waste of time. Yes I am naming them intentionally, I felt that behavior was antagonistic and exploitative.
      - 12y ago
freshflowers 12y ago
As a hiring manager, I want those resumes as an initial filter. No, they don't say much about engineering skills, but they tell me quite a lot about a number of other things. Things like communication skills, priorities, attention to detail and motivation are strongly reflected by someones resume. The only people who can afford to not put serious effort into their resumes are people that have an online (Github etc) or offline (network) footprint that speaks for itself. But those also tend to be the people that don't get recruited via the formal application process.
nnnnni 12y ago
You know what's frustrating? When you don't even make it to the interview stage because hiring managers think that "Red Hat" and "Linux" are two different things. I was recently passed over because my 15 years' of experience with Linux has been with multiple distributions (including RPM-based ones) and my resume didn't have a line that just said "Red Hat" on it. Them: "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't hire you because you don't have any JavaScript experience..." Candidate: "What do you think all of this stuff with JS in the name on my resume means?!"
- Spearchucker 12y ago
  Had the same experience. These days I tailor my resume for every single job application. I make sure it uses the language the job description uses. If it says Red Hat, my resume says Red Hat. If it says JavaScript, my resume says JavaScript. It takes time, but its been worth it. Where a skill is required that I don't have, I don't mention it. Where a skill applies to a version I'm not experienced with, I leave the version number out. When the job spec requires experience of say, Red Hat, and I have experience of multiple distributions, I lie and call it Red Hat. The point of the resume is to land the interview, so I make sure my resume doesn't fail me in achieving that objective.
  - pc86 12y ago
    > These days I tailor my resume for every single job application You absolutely need to do this unless you're in crazy demand. Every generic resume I've sent out has yielded exactly zero phone calls. Every tailor-made resume I've sent out has gotten at least to the in-person interview stage. Survivor bias? Maybe, but 5 jobs in since college and I'm never sending generic resumes anywhere ever again.
    - jplahn 12y ago
      While I understand the sentiment, I only used a single resume for all of my applications this past fall. But I think the reason it worked is that I knew what positions I wanted to apply for and they were all similar(ish). So my resume matched all of them. I did find that when I was applying to the bigger SV companies (and Seattle), I wasn't necessarily applying for a specific position, so even if I had wanted to tailor it, it would have been more of a challenge. That's just my experience though. I do believe that if I was going for a very specific position, I would definitely spend the extra time to make sure it was perfect.
rumcajz 12y ago
The interesting part is that recruiters seem more in agreement when identifying low performers. When faced with a high performer their scores differ wildly.
- ghaff 12y ago
  It wouldn't especially surprise me if that were the case. It's a lot easier to identify people who don't meet the requirements of a position than to intuit how good a job they'll do based on paper qualifications. You'll make mistakes in both cases, but more in the latter. Testing like SATs are similar. A low score is probably a much better predictor of (lack of) success at an elite school than a high score is a predictor of success.
stared 12y ago
The experiment looks flawed. It seems that ALL (or almost all) resumes are, at least, OK. Resumes can work for weeding out bad fits, or people doing things clearly out of the scope of interest. They are not, and cannot, be a tool for choosing the best. (Unless success is so spectacular, that you know the person by name anyway.) It's HR's delusion that previous -perceived- presented achievements written on one's resume can serve well for predicting future achievements in our company. So, don't overoptimize it an do technical interviews with people actually working on a given technical problem.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  But can we have technical interviews instead of brain-teasers? Maybe it is just me, but I don't do puzzles. I solve big problems, and I have a track record of being very successful at it. I juggle people, and tools, and objectives, and timelines, and get things done. I like projects, and I am not afraid of hard work. If I like the objective of a project, I will wade through human vomit to get it done. Brain teasers are none of that for me. They are some kind of parlor-trick brain-test. I am not necessarily bad at them... but I am just a bit better than okay. I do not want to have to practice them just to get past an interview.
  - wallflower 12y ago
    https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3660-the-person-theyll-become https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3660-the-person-theyll-become
    - hessenwolf 12y ago
      Interesting, and a point I agree with, but I don't see how it relates to the above?
  - LordHumungous 12y ago
    Most companies don't do brain teasers any more. That was a fad from the 00's.
codingdave 12y ago
Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation. When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops. I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list of names down to a reasonable number to actually call. So I'm not judging people's skill levels yet -- I'm looking for something in their history that tells me they are bringing more to the table than knowing how to code. I don't even have preconceived notions of what that might be - just something that sparks me to think their experience has something in common with what we do. We'll weed out the weak technical candidates in an initial call, then continue with the people who are both strong technically and a good fit for the work and the culture. So the whole premise that I am not getting it "right" when judging a person skill based on their resume is missing the point. It isn't that I don't care... but I know reading a resume won't give me an accurate answer, so it isn't even a piece of the decision making criteria yet.
- ElComradio 12y ago
  "When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others." ... but STEM shortage! ;)
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    This REALLY gets into my nerves Interview like candidates are a dime a dozen, then come whine about not being able to find good candidates
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  > When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. With that attitude, I hope you aren't complaining about how hard it is to find talent. > It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. This gets parroted a lot around here, but with no supporting evidence other than highly improbable hypotheticals or black swan events. On the other hand, I know plenty of companies that have had to deal with poor candidates, from a Fortune 500 with 70000+ worldwide employees down to a small 12-person shop, and none have suffered serious consequences from these poor choices. Considering the lack of hard evidence supporting your statement, I believe these companies I am familiar with are the typical case and not "lucky".
rurban 12y ago
They remind me of these folks: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/05/when-a-project-manager-speaks-to-another-project-manager/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/05/when-a-project-mana...
learnstats2 12y ago
If you exclude a single outlier (a candidate rated poorly by the experimenter scores 100% in the resume test), the resume test doesn't look too bad. Apart from that one, the consistently well-rated CVs are all from the strong side. So it could be argued that CVs work pretty well for recruiters - hiring from the best CVs makes it unlikely you'll hire a weak candidate.
- jschwartzi 12y ago
  This also gives us concrete data on what makes a good CV, provided anyone has access to the ratings and can also come up with a good classification metric to extract attributes.
hdennis 12y ago
In the part of the article that lists "Rejection Reasons" one rejection type is "Too Enterprisey". Could someone please clear up what that means for me?
- VLM 12y ago
  Here is a parody of what they're terrified of https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
- ExpiredLink 12y ago
  Prejudice nowadays is accepted as long as it is not related to race, gender or religion.
- ghaff 12y ago
  This blog post discusses it a bit. http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/ http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/ It wouldn't shock me if it also gets used as code for things like "hasn't worked at a startup before" or, frankly, "too old."
  - hdennis 12y ago
    Thank you for the link, it was very informative. The two main points in the blog stated that an "enterprisey" developer may not be a good fit in a startup (change in development pace, responsibilities, etc.) and that they may use languages unpopular in a startup environment (Java and .Net are called out in the post). I'm interested to see if there are other posts that echo this sentiment, aside from the OP, because now I have a fear of being "too enterprisey."
  - fecak 12y ago
    I wrote the piece you linked, and I do see still see that feedback on some candidates almost two years later. I think your interpretation of this as code for other things is fairly accurate, although not as much for the 'too old' piece. I've heard it for even the 7-10 years of experience range (though perhaps that could be construed as too old for some).
tehwalrus 12y ago
I'm in the process of going through technical interviews with a bunch of companies (some I approached, some approached me.) The coolest thing has been some peoples' reaction to the little details on my CV (Resume.) Compared to the other very unsuccessful interview, where the MD just listened to me talk for a few minutes and said "you're not what we're looking for" (no programmer in the interview), getting engineers to ask me end-of-interview questions with a smile on their face was really fun (whether or not I get the jobs in the end.) The OP says that engineers were quite good if the CV contained enough detail about what the candidate had been doing, the substance of the projects. In both cases, the little question was where I had included a bullet thinking "noone in HR will know what this means, but I think it's cool" were the ones that got the smile question. For the record, all my CVs are skills-based (that is, a set of bullets around "programming", "teamwork", "communication" etc) followed by a brief chronology of work and education, rather than having to list every position (student volunteering included) in order to say what I did there that was relevant. Customising which bullets (and even sections) you include on a per-application basis is extremely important, of course, so that the HR person can see "skill that we asked for: 5 bullets" right there on the first page.
- _dark_matter_ 12y ago
  This may be off-topic, but it sure sounds to me like what you're submitting is not a CV but a resume. Those are two different items. CVs are a comprehensive history of yourself and your accomplishments, resumes are short, tailored briefs of why you are fit for the job.
  - tehwalrus 12y ago
    in the UK, they're all called CVs.
  - cben 12y ago
    Interesting, certainly makes etymological sense. I never realized that, in Israel the two terms are used pretty interchangably. Wikipedia says CVs are much more comprehensive in some countries, esp. North America.
iuguy 12y ago
Funnily enough I've been working on this a lot lately for a book I've been writing[1]. It seems there are several audiences for a CV (recruiter, hiring manager, supporting interviewer) and a fundamental error that people make is writing a CV for more or less than these three types of people. The fundamental truth is that no-one wants to read a CV. They're at best an advert, but people tend to overstuff them or fill them with things irrelevant to the position they're applying for, so they get ditched by people who have tons of them to read through. I have a free email course about career hacking for anyone that subscribes to my book's mailing list. It's focused on people who want to become penetration testers but the career material is applicable to anyone wanting to get into a discipline that they're not already in. [1] - https://www.rawhex.com/ https://www.rawhex.com/
3am 12y ago
A resume is a list of qualifications, and to see how a candidate frames themselves. They also set expectations for me, the interviewer for the questions I would like to ask (they say they're a Node and Clojure expert? I will tailor my questions to verify that). It's also a way (in addition to the cover letter) to quickly judge their communication skills. I wouldn't hire someone without 1) a cover letter 2) a resume 3) a phone screen 4) review of their projects (ie github) 5) a team interview 6) references. Granted, I don't have to do it at scale. It's time consuming, but not as much as a bad hire.
- ghaff 12y ago
  I tend to agree that a lot of the hate on resumes seems to be missing the point. Sure, if I know or know of someone, maybe a resume doesn't add a whole lot. But they provide: - A first pass at there being some match between experience/background and those needed for the position. - Some guidance for the interview process. Frankly, a lot of the details on the resume don't really matter all that much to me but, overall, it usually gives me a sense of which avenues are worth probing in more detail and which ones I can skip over fairly quickly. Sure, I could draw a lot of this out during the interview but it's easier to read over a couple of pages in advance and spend a few minutes thinking about how to spend the interview slot.
joshyeager 12y ago
I took the survey, and would have done a 20-minute phone screen with five out of the six resumes I got. All six were basically qualified for their roles. That is vastly different from reality. When I post job ads, at least 25% of the resumes I get are completely unlike the job requirements, and another 50% superficially match but are obviously unqualified. The remaining 25% look like the resumes I saw in the survey. When I get resumes from recruiters, I generally don't get any of the "didn't even read the ad" resumes, but I still get about 1/3 obviously unqualified candidates. So overall, a resume filter lets me skip hundreds of useless phone screens or face-to-face interviews. I may lose a few good candidates in that process, but not many. I'm really not sure why this author is trying to use resumes to decide whether to interview these candidates. Once you have them filtered to this level, a quick phone screen gives you much better information than a resume, and doesn't take too much time.
cpach 12y ago
Keep in mind that sending out resumes is not the only way to get a good job. Some relevant previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532886
metacorrector 12y ago
um, "where you went to school" does not matter only to people who didn't go anywhere. when you go to school filled with very smart people you really get used to working with really smart people. I'm not saying it's panacea or even good, it just is. So, when you say "where you went to school" makes no difference in hiring, that tells me more about your hiring culture than it does about the candidates. I got a serious degree in computer science at a serious school, and I'm not hiring people without one, just based on being able to expect a certain baseline for conversations. think of it like high school geometry, Euclidean proofs. It's not necessarily rocket science, it's taught to a vast swath of the population. But imagine a job that required a knowledge of geometry, are you going to look at the resume of somebody "self taught" the same way as somebody who went to the Alexandria Institute of Geometry? Yes, there are many other factors to a complete human being, and a good worker, but one of the valuable things you learn from a good education is how to tease apart complex problems and look at which inputs have what effect on what output (kind of like separation of concerns). I'm am commenting on one aspect of a resume or a hire; pointing out all the other aspects will not dissuade me from my point.
mkremer90 12y ago
I can tell you that I got interviews at 6 "startups" (ranging from garage to multi-million dollars) in San Francisco without giving any of them resumes. And I live in Milwaukee, so they even had to fly me out. Seems like SF is on top of it, Milwaukee on the other hand, only cares about how many years of experience you have. Nothing else.
vishalzone2002 12y ago
I like the article but really if resumes suck then what doesn't. Companies look at resumes for 1-2 minutes on top will they ever have time to browse through hundreds of lines of code, projects, portfolios, etc. I don't think so.

224 points by slyall 12y ago

I would think that the other interpretation of this result is just that many engineers suck at writing resumes, which is totally plausible. In fact, one could analyze this in the current data set by looking at the total number of correct predictions versus the different resumes in the set. A well-written resume would then be one which results in correct predictions most frequently. You'd then have two dimensions for each resume - quality as judged by the author and signaling accuracy in the resume itself. I've seen resumes in all corners of that plot, so I can't say that I'd throw out the resume straight away, but it does indicate that there is some large gap between what hirers want and what candidates think they want.

itsdrewmiller 12y ago
What is the interpretation to which you are proposing an alternative?
- klochner 12y ago
  That resumes are an objectively bad communication/evaluation tool.
  - itsdrewmiller 12y ago
    I think that's a stronger statement than is intended in the article - theoretically if people wrote resumes differently they could be good, but the way they are used now, they are bad. You're providing a theory as to why they are bad now, but not really contradicting anything in the article.
    - TTPrograms 12y ago
      "Resumes just aren’t that useful" "...at the end of the day, the resume is a low-signal document." "Longer-term, how engineers are filtered fundamentally needs to change." The conclusion seems to be that resumes are fundamentally flawed.
    - itsdrewmiller 12y ago
      Probably just arguing semantics at this point. I think "engineers need to all learn how to write resumes differently from how any of them do now" qualifies as a pretty fundamental change. Although I guess you really only need to get the good ones to do it. :-)
      - marcosdumay 12y ago
        From my conclusions, that's also a valid take-away. Looks like it goes both ways. Companies will gain better candidates if they stopped using resumes, and engineers will land better jobs if they started creating resumes that are different from what everybody else writes.
pekk 12y ago
If a large number of people suck at writing resumes enough to throw off a search, the question is raised of why you are first and foremost evaluating candidates for their ability to write resumes.
kabouseng 12y ago
Since technical writing is part of an engineers job requirements, I would argue that an engineer incapable of writing a decent resume is already at a disadvantage.
- eigenvector 12y ago
  Resumes are inherently hard to prepare because the requirements are often deliberately withheld. Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag, but other than basic linguistic elements it's not really a fair way to evaluate someone's technical communication skills. Some companies treat the job posting itself as a type of puzzle you're expected to guess at with your cover letter and resume. Also, a lot of job postings are terribly written, extremely vague or otherwise problematic, so it's not a one-sided problem. It's hard to know if you're meeting the employer's needs when their posting is asking for someone who could engineer a mission to Mars on their lunch break and will work for $50,000 and 1 week of vacation.
  - tempestn 12y ago
    In the intro of the article, it stated that the strongest signal of applicant quality found on resumes was the number of typos and grammatical errors. Perhaps that was an exaggeration or even a joke, but if not, I would agree that this should be a red flag, regardless of a person's qualifications. (I would similarly judge a potential employer on the quality of their job posting. I know when I write a job posting I go to a great deal of effort to make sure it reads well and reflects our company as well as possible.)
  - kabouseng 12y ago
    "Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag" I agree. The same could also be said about a companies job posting. If the job posting is "vague or problematic", it also indicates the company has no idea of what skill set they need. This has many parallels with a client not properly being able to specify his requirements. Usually if a client cannot properly specify his requirements, he also underestimate the amount of work / cost it will require to develop. The same with a job posting, if they cant properly specify a job posting, an employer also might think the job is easy or he can pay someone peanuts to do it.
threatofrain 12y ago
I propose an alternative or complimentary idea. That cultural inertia guides not only that employers expect the same kinds of data, but also that employees do the same. If employers wanted to, they could start the ball rolling by simply requesting for more predictive data up-front. Candidates often make specific designs to the company they are applying to. Then companies can filter these candidates out to control the load on expensive interviews. I'd also say that if a company wants an introspective hiring system, they would naturally pursue a strategy where you identify the kinds of predictors (exclusive or inclusive) you want and request them in resume or some screening test that goes with the resume.

jejfpoiejf 12y ago

>I make pretty websites for the internet. >I'm a real engineer guys!

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

jayhuang 12y ago

I feel like this data is a small piece of the age long debate about hiring methods and competence/success indicators. There's been a lot of data about how even people who think they are experts at finding good candidates are really no better than someone flipping a coin. How then, if the line between "strong/less strong" candidates are so blurred, does Aline draw the line between "strong/less strong" herself? Isn't the way she splits the candidates' resumes also part of the exact thing she's trying to measure? > "...then even if my criteria for whether each resume belonged to a strong candidate wasn’t perfect, the results would still be compelling"

itsdrewmiller 12y ago
I don't think you actually demonstrate this statement: > if the line between "strong/less strong" candidates are so blurred It is hard to tell prospectively whether someone will be a good programmer. It is not too difficult to tell retrospectively. (Any research that tries to measure competence/success indicators must be using something as its dependent variable, right?) The line you quote is specifically about the fact that resumes could be meaningful even if her competence assignments were not. Resumes seem to fail at that test as well. The biggest threat to validity would probably be that different people will be good/bad developers in different environments, and that this effect is very strong. Then each reviewer could be good at selecting for success in their own company, but they would only agree with each or with aline to the extent that their environment was similar to that of other companies or the ones that aline placed those engineers at. I am pretty comfortable rejecting this theory out of hand myself.

hw 12y ago

It's hard to gauge a person's qualities from a resume. Things like culture fit (extremely important IMO), fast thinker, quick learner - are all aspects that can't be garnered from a resume. IMO, resumes are only a decent filter for experience, and provides a baseline for the interview. There are many I've interviewed that padded their resumes and said they are experienced in something they really aren't, and there are some who dont have much experience but are smart and quick learners. Without a resume, what else can we go with when it comes to hiring? In my career, the best hires have always been from two sources: - someone i've worked with and trust before - someone who was recommended by someone i worked with and trust before

itsdrewmiller 12y ago
What do you think about the writing sample idea in the article? Doesn't seem crazy to me.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Great... if you're hiring writers. Writing skill is uncorrelated with everything else. I'm a great writer. Many engineers I admire and respect are not. I've got no magic bullet. Hiring people you know is good, and I strongly recommend informal face-to-face interviews. Two of the best interviews I've ever had (one where I was the interviewer, the other where I was the interviewee) were mostly about language design, which turns out to be a really revealing topic for discovering attitudes about process, standards, and software design generally. But how to screen people in the pipeline so you can avoid interviewing everyone who applies? No idea.
  - itsdrewmiller 12y ago
    Is it actually uncorrelated with everything else? I think it's worth investigating (and I hope the addendum at the top of her article means that she will let us know how it works out!) In my experience great engineers who are bad writers definitely exist, but are more the exception than the rule.
- hw 12y ago

fredophile 12y ago

I'm not very surprised that resumes aren't a good indicator of performance. They're real only useful as an indicator of experience. In other words they tell you about quantity and not quality. I'd say if they seem reasonable for the role then move them on to the next step of the hiring process. Every interview process that I've been involved with has had a series of increasing expensive steps designed to find specific information and weed people out as early as possible. It's also worth noting that several of the criteria people used to reject candidates in the article aren't good predictors. For example, lack of pedigree doesn't tell you much. People from a variety of backgrounds can be good or bad as coders. A good or bad pedigree can be a useful indicator.

hacknat 12y ago

>For each resume, I had a pretty good idea of how strong the engineer in question was, and I split resumes into two strength-based groups. To make this judgment call, I drew on my personal experience — most of the resumes came from candidates I placed (or tried to place) at top-tier startups. In these cases, I knew exactly how the engineer had done in technical interviews, and, more often than not, I had visibility into how they performed on the job afterwards. The remainder of resumes came from engineers I had worked with directly. Does anyone else think this is a huge caveat getting thrown into a blender of numbers? Why does this person's opinion even matter? Why should I take this at face value? I'm not trying to say resumes are a good indicator of anything, but neither is this "study".

usaar333 12y ago
Agreed. The study is showing how much people's views of resume X agrees with the author's full evaluation. But what I or my company consider a quality candidate may differ from the author. On another note, I've found that for recent grads, GPA, school, and major (all items on the resume) are excellent predictors of interview performance.
- itsdrewmiller 12y ago
  It goes further than just that - the stuff about Fleiss' kappa shows that not only do these people not agree with the author; they also don't agree with each other. Maybe all development shops are so different that there is no significant correlation between success at one place and success at another, but I highly doubt it!
apolretom 12y ago
Thank you. This entire 'study' is nonsense because this recruiter has no idea how 'strong' these candidates really are. She only thinks she knows, just like every arrogant jerk who's ever conducted a technical interview.
- cowls 12y ago
  Yep, nonsense in = nonsense out. This "study" is pointless.

joelgrus 12y ago

I don't see anywhere the Ockham's Razor explanation that bad candidates fudge their resumes in order to make themselves look like good candidates.

itsdrewmiller 12y ago
I don't think the article posits a cause for why resumes are useless - just argues that they are useless. Your guess about why is definitely a reasonable option. From a hiring manager's perspective, it doesn't matter all that much.
pekk 12y ago
I think it's even simpler just to observe that the way someone chooses to write and target a resume has no particular relationship to how well they would do the job.

Fede_V 12y ago

Interestingly, why didn't she do some kind of text mining/classification to try to show what features gave the highest discrimination between the two classes?

photoJ 12y ago

I am not sure how I would feel if my resume was posted here. I've already found someone I was able to quickly identify by looking at the resumes. I would have expected more discretion on the recruiters part.

leeny 12y ago
Aline here. I got permission from everyone whose resume I used in this experiment.
- photoJ 12y ago
  Fair enough....

mbesto 12y ago

> As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the board, and after running the numbers, it began to look like resumes might not be a particularly effective filtering tool in the first place. Her theory - people suck at filtering because the tool they use is poor. > it may not be a matter of being good or bad at judging resumes but rather a matter of the task itself being flawed — at the end of the day, the resume is a low-signal document. Resumes suck for hiring all people. But that's not the purpose of a resume -- it's a low-signal filter to weed out the initial batch of candidates. If you treat hiring like a sales funnel (and you should), then a resume is a great way to eliminate unnecessary time for your team to assess someone's cultural fit. Expecting the resume to be high signal filter is pretty naive.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> If you treat hiring like a sales funnel (and you should), then a resume is a great way to eliminate unnecessary time for your team to assess someone's cultural fit. Where's the evidence that it is great at this? Certainly, its a basis for narrowing the set of candidates that get further review, but is it a good basis?
- mbesto 12y ago
  Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? I was slightly perturbed by the original author as she offered no real solution.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? Where's the evidence that resumes are better than random selection among applicants into the next round, much less enough better to be a net positive given the resources that go into reviewing them?
    - mbesto 12y ago
      Huh? I think you're confusing the concept of "top of the funnel". Are you suggesting that I randomly select people to interview from a pile of resumes? What if I get a marketing person who has no software experience in the pile for a software developer job?

lowglow 12y ago

Some of the worst people I know also have the best resumes. I think they've learned to optimize where they can.

eo3x0 12y ago
It also works the other way around. Some of the best people I know have horrible resumes or no resume at all. Resumes are probably subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect that tends to plague software development.

moron4hire 12y ago

My own experiences with interviewing HR pre-filtered resumes bears this out, so I can't imagine what the entire firehose is like.

rezashirazian 12y ago

for anyone relating with every "engineers suck at writing resumes" comment; I've been using my stackoverflow profile as a resume and it's been working out great.

vonnik 12y ago

The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here: http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a-new-way-to-network-interview/ http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a... We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance. A study that Google released last year supports that. The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. They chose what they wanted to work on together. In a sense, we were batch processing applicants while gathering much richer information than resumes provide. Strong candidates we didn't hire, we shared in the Sequoia network. We ended up making eight interview offers (several candidates decided to work elsewhere), and we hired one engineer. The whole event was inspired by this essay: http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234 http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234

more_original 12y ago
This sounds like a really interesting idea. I probably takes a weekend to prepare a proper application anyway, so spending the time on a project (which may be fun even) sounds much better.
fsniper 12y ago
This is a good interview process for a coding gig. I am a devops engineer who is mainly a system administrator. I code but I code as a tool not as a goal. So for this kind of positions looking for coding performance does not give good indicators. Or you can not do this kind of experiment for other kinds of positions.
yangchi 12y ago
>The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. I see more and more companies doing this small projects type of initial screening. I like it. But time is actually an expensive cost. Suppose your candidate makes $130,000 per year, which isn't even a high salary in bay area. Then if he/she spends 15 hours on this project, then we are talking about 1000 bucks. Now that is quite a cost, isn't it? Honestly compared to a white board programming puzzle, such projects always make more sense to me. But most companies will still do white-boards during on-site after the initial project. And although I like most of those projects, even in my case, if I happen to be busy, then I do feel like they are annoying. I'd rather spend my time doing what I was busy doing, or learning new stuff, or working on my pet projects, rather than working on a project that may or may not make sense to me, just to show to other people that I can code, and I can write clean code. Let alone I happen to know some friends who just hate those projects and will never do them unless it's from their dream company. Plus, there are people who are better communicator when they talk face-to-face. Then it's really hard to say if such project is really better than white-boarding for that type of candidates. But it's still way better than those 30-minutes online coding over a phone interview. That's the one I hate most.. Even Skype interview is better than phone interview.

Moto7451 12y ago

Resumes are just a broad filter for skills and a way to find useful questions to later flesh out a candidate and their competence/experience level. It shouldn't be shocking that code samples and/or a short programming test and a phone call will tell you more about the candidate, and if they should come in for a full interview, than blind keyword bingo.

JimboOmega 12y ago

As someone trying to hire, I find myself going through resumes for the firs ttime... And honestly, my primary metric is if the word "rails" appears anywhere (It's a ruby on rails job). I might even let that go if I saw a cover letter explaining why they liked rails (but maybe don't have professional experience in it). Honestly this is a pretty low bar. And the way I've been doing it, the phone screen that follows is pretty softball. But after that, I give out the coding exercise... If you complete it, you get an in person interview for the most part. But all the rest of it - looking at resumes, the phone screen - sort of seems like a waist of time. I don't care how big a game you can talk, if you can't do the coding exercise (which, btw, is the most common outcome - they beg a couple extensions and then give up), then... oh well.

ownagefool 12y ago
Honestly, if hiring permenant staff for long term occupation, I probably wouldn't even require that much. If they have php, perl or python on their CV, then they'll have had the opportunity to know everything else you'll want them to know.

ddoss 12y ago

Totally agree! KeepSafe is taking this exact approach to hiring right now. https://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html https://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html

zubairq 12y ago

This article should be titled, "Resumes that suck suck for hiring engineers". Resumes that are clear help someone massively, or at the very least do not get in the way. At NemCV we have 100% success rate finding people jobs, and a CV/resume may not be everything needed to get the job, but is a bare expected minimum. Every employer no matter how they find a candidate always asks for a resume. Zubair, NemCV

jnaour 12y ago

What I feel right now is that the hiring process is more and more based on personnal branding. If you want to have a job interview in top startup you have to have a good github, smart blog posts, a good stackoverflow, a good kaggle, some certificats from coursera, some conf etc. It's a good thing for hiring process, you could judge a candidat more easely if you could read some of his code or thoughts. You could have more interesting job offers from people that actually understand what you do. The problem is that you have to spend lot of time in improving these things. Some are easy because it's natural to do some work on a open source project that you're interested in, the personnal branding thing it's just a bonus, but some other need works... I believe that in all automatic job applying process that I tried recently there were fields for linkedin, github, personnal blogs, websites etc.

ryandrake 12y ago
A company that relies on GitHub and blog posts will miss tons of highly-qualified candidates who don't (or cannot due to their employment agreement) work on open source and who don't spend their weekends blogging and posting to StackOverflow. Sure, I can see interesting programming side projects being a nice bonus, but it's not a replacement for a resume + technical interview.

Zenst 12y ago

Sadly one of the biggest problems I have found regarding Resumes/CV's in the IT industry and companies is the rise of HR departments who will just word filter the candidates and even remove people they deem not suitable. Even the classic case of filtering out people they deem `overqualified`, which sadly means the IT manager most often does not get to even see or known about the better candidates and ends up with a selection picked by HR people who know nothing of the work involved. I for one welcome phone interaction and tests, though not all tests perfect and found many flawed tests and errors in tests in the past. Some companies appreciate when you tell them of mistakes and others will hold it against you, though again, found HR departments if you point out a mistake will not take it onboard and take it as criticism and in a negative way and hold that against you. So for me, I do feel HR departments play too large a part in recruitment in IT than their skillsets entail. Not saying a golden solution, but I do feel that many recruitment processes have gone down hill with HR wedging themselves into the process more and more and filtering out candidates that the manager doing the recruiting, never even knows about. Though this is all based upon my experience and I'm sure others had different views. But for me, having been turned down for a job for being overqualified and case of you actually knowing the manager and he never even got to see your CV, well, sadly I know it is very true and happens.

nguyenm 12y ago
Yeah agree. Am trying to bootstrap a startup around crowd sourcing the interview process as a potential solution to the disconnect between recruiters and hiring managers. Could always use some more thought partners on it for the interested (see profile for my contact). Sorry, no website yet (busy on an mvp) but hopefully soon.
raverbashing 12y ago
"I for one welcome phone interaction and tests" Yes, but you can't call everybody that sent you a CV. RH filtering sucks, but is needed usually. Of course there are false positives and negatives Yes, RH might miss a J2EE expert for a position requiring Java experience, but these days companies search from big databases (Linkedin/Indeed) so this type of grepping is usually needed.
12y ago

fiatjaf 12y ago

Resumes suck for hiring anyone.

aercolino 12y ago

Many recruiters don't read resumes and many of those that do, don't understand them, be they from HR or IT depts. Arrogance, disrespect and plain unpreparedness.

raverbashing 12y ago
Actually, from my last experience, winning the recruiters was easy, it was the company RH/Engineers was tough They're the first step in the funnel, if you can't get through them your resume usually needs fixing. And of course the interviewing flaws that are discusses several times on HN play a part as well.

iN7h33nD 12y ago

The real questions are: What would be better than sending a resume? Should the job ask for a resume as well as have every applicant submit a project somewhere, one which will be "unit tested" automatically to filter candidates? Should they just ask for the project? Should there be something other than a resume like a timed coding test or something (where the applicant needs to take half an hour and write a program to do X in the language that they will need to work in, probably something really simple)?

nissimk 12y ago
There's a great book which answers your first question: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Send-Resume-Other-Contrarian/dp/0786865962 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Send-Resume-Other-Contrarian/dp/0... It's a good collection of advanced marketing techniques for job searchers.
wallflower 12y ago
A friend of mine made it through the initial interview stages at SoundCloud. He was then given three days to build an iOS app using the SoundCloud API that showed off his experience and skill. I like that approach because three days is a nice length of time to build something you can be proud of. He was interviewing for the iOS team, of course.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  Was he paid for his work? If he wasn't, he's part of the problem in hiring processes in our industry.
  - marktangotango 12y ago
    Agreed, I did a coding exercise for the Nerdery once, I epended about 8 hours on it, no one even reviewed it. Total waste of time. Yes I am naming them intentionally, I felt that behavior was antagonistic and exploitative.
    - 12y ago

freshflowers 12y ago

As a hiring manager, I want those resumes as an initial filter. No, they don't say much about engineering skills, but they tell me quite a lot about a number of other things. Things like communication skills, priorities, attention to detail and motivation are strongly reflected by someones resume. The only people who can afford to not put serious effort into their resumes are people that have an online (Github etc) or offline (network) footprint that speaks for itself. But those also tend to be the people that don't get recruited via the formal application process.

nnnnni 12y ago

You know what's frustrating? When you don't even make it to the interview stage because hiring managers think that "Red Hat" and "Linux" are two different things. I was recently passed over because my 15 years' of experience with Linux has been with multiple distributions (including RPM-based ones) and my resume didn't have a line that just said "Red Hat" on it. Them: "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't hire you because you don't have any JavaScript experience..." Candidate: "What do you think all of this stuff with JS in the name on my resume means?!"

Spearchucker 12y ago
Had the same experience. These days I tailor my resume for every single job application. I make sure it uses the language the job description uses. If it says Red Hat, my resume says Red Hat. If it says JavaScript, my resume says JavaScript. It takes time, but its been worth it. Where a skill is required that I don't have, I don't mention it. Where a skill applies to a version I'm not experienced with, I leave the version number out. When the job spec requires experience of say, Red Hat, and I have experience of multiple distributions, I lie and call it Red Hat. The point of the resume is to land the interview, so I make sure my resume doesn't fail me in achieving that objective.
- pc86 12y ago
  > These days I tailor my resume for every single job application You absolutely need to do this unless you're in crazy demand. Every generic resume I've sent out has yielded exactly zero phone calls. Every tailor-made resume I've sent out has gotten at least to the in-person interview stage. Survivor bias? Maybe, but 5 jobs in since college and I'm never sending generic resumes anywhere ever again.
  - jplahn 12y ago
    While I understand the sentiment, I only used a single resume for all of my applications this past fall. But I think the reason it worked is that I knew what positions I wanted to apply for and they were all similar(ish). So my resume matched all of them. I did find that when I was applying to the bigger SV companies (and Seattle), I wasn't necessarily applying for a specific position, so even if I had wanted to tailor it, it would have been more of a challenge. That's just my experience though. I do believe that if I was going for a very specific position, I would definitely spend the extra time to make sure it was perfect.

rumcajz 12y ago

The interesting part is that recruiters seem more in agreement when identifying low performers. When faced with a high performer their scores differ wildly.

ghaff 12y ago
It wouldn't especially surprise me if that were the case. It's a lot easier to identify people who don't meet the requirements of a position than to intuit how good a job they'll do based on paper qualifications. You'll make mistakes in both cases, but more in the latter. Testing like SATs are similar. A low score is probably a much better predictor of (lack of) success at an elite school than a high score is a predictor of success.

stared 12y ago

The experiment looks flawed. It seems that ALL (or almost all) resumes are, at least, OK. Resumes can work for weeding out bad fits, or people doing things clearly out of the scope of interest. They are not, and cannot, be a tool for choosing the best. (Unless success is so spectacular, that you know the person by name anyway.) It's HR's delusion that previous -perceived- presented achievements written on one's resume can serve well for predicting future achievements in our company. So, don't overoptimize it an do technical interviews with people actually working on a given technical problem.

hessenwolf 12y ago
But can we have technical interviews instead of brain-teasers? Maybe it is just me, but I don't do puzzles. I solve big problems, and I have a track record of being very successful at it. I juggle people, and tools, and objectives, and timelines, and get things done. I like projects, and I am not afraid of hard work. If I like the objective of a project, I will wade through human vomit to get it done. Brain teasers are none of that for me. They are some kind of parlor-trick brain-test. I am not necessarily bad at them... but I am just a bit better than okay. I do not want to have to practice them just to get past an interview.
- wallflower 12y ago
  https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3660-the-person-theyll-become https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3660-the-person-theyll-become
  - hessenwolf 12y ago
    Interesting, and a point I agree with, but I don't see how it relates to the above?
- LordHumungous 12y ago
  Most companies don't do brain teasers any more. That was a fad from the 00's.

codingdave 12y ago

Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation. When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops. I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list of names down to a reasonable number to actually call. So I'm not judging people's skill levels yet -- I'm looking for something in their history that tells me they are bringing more to the table than knowing how to code. I don't even have preconceived notions of what that might be - just something that sparks me to think their experience has something in common with what we do. We'll weed out the weak technical candidates in an initial call, then continue with the people who are both strong technically and a good fit for the work and the culture. So the whole premise that I am not getting it "right" when judging a person skill based on their resume is missing the point. It isn't that I don't care... but I know reading a resume won't give me an accurate answer, so it isn't even a piece of the decision making criteria yet.

ElComradio 12y ago
"When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others." ... but STEM shortage! ;)
- raverbashing 12y ago
  This REALLY gets into my nerves Interview like candidates are a dime a dozen, then come whine about not being able to find good candidates
deleted 12y ago
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vonmoltke 12y ago
> When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. With that attitude, I hope you aren't complaining about how hard it is to find talent. > It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. This gets parroted a lot around here, but with no supporting evidence other than highly improbable hypotheticals or black swan events. On the other hand, I know plenty of companies that have had to deal with poor candidates, from a Fortune 500 with 70000+ worldwide employees down to a small 12-person shop, and none have suffered serious consequences from these poor choices. Considering the lack of hard evidence supporting your statement, I believe these companies I am familiar with are the typical case and not "lucky".

rurban 12y ago

They remind me of these folks: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/05/when-a-project-manager-speaks-to-another-project-manager/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/05/when-a-project-mana...

learnstats2 12y ago

If you exclude a single outlier (a candidate rated poorly by the experimenter scores 100% in the resume test), the resume test doesn't look too bad. Apart from that one, the consistently well-rated CVs are all from the strong side. So it could be argued that CVs work pretty well for recruiters - hiring from the best CVs makes it unlikely you'll hire a weak candidate.

jschwartzi 12y ago
This also gives us concrete data on what makes a good CV, provided anyone has access to the ratings and can also come up with a good classification metric to extract attributes.

hdennis 12y ago

In the part of the article that lists "Rejection Reasons" one rejection type is "Too Enterprisey". Could someone please clear up what that means for me?

VLM 12y ago
Here is a parody of what they're terrified of https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
ExpiredLink 12y ago
Prejudice nowadays is accepted as long as it is not related to race, gender or religion.
ghaff 12y ago
This blog post discusses it a bit. http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/ http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/ It wouldn't shock me if it also gets used as code for things like "hasn't worked at a startup before" or, frankly, "too old."
- hdennis 12y ago
  Thank you for the link, it was very informative. The two main points in the blog stated that an "enterprisey" developer may not be a good fit in a startup (change in development pace, responsibilities, etc.) and that they may use languages unpopular in a startup environment (Java and .Net are called out in the post). I'm interested to see if there are other posts that echo this sentiment, aside from the OP, because now I have a fear of being "too enterprisey."
- fecak 12y ago
  I wrote the piece you linked, and I do see still see that feedback on some candidates almost two years later. I think your interpretation of this as code for other things is fairly accurate, although not as much for the 'too old' piece. I've heard it for even the 7-10 years of experience range (though perhaps that could be construed as too old for some).

tehwalrus 12y ago

I'm in the process of going through technical interviews with a bunch of companies (some I approached, some approached me.) The coolest thing has been some peoples' reaction to the little details on my CV (Resume.) Compared to the other very unsuccessful interview, where the MD just listened to me talk for a few minutes and said "you're not what we're looking for" (no programmer in the interview), getting engineers to ask me end-of-interview questions with a smile on their face was really fun (whether or not I get the jobs in the end.) The OP says that engineers were quite good if the CV contained enough detail about what the candidate had been doing, the substance of the projects. In both cases, the little question was where I had included a bullet thinking "noone in HR will know what this means, but I think it's cool" were the ones that got the smile question. For the record, all my CVs are skills-based (that is, a set of bullets around "programming", "teamwork", "communication" etc) followed by a brief chronology of work and education, rather than having to list every position (student volunteering included) in order to say what I did there that was relevant. Customising which bullets (and even sections) you include on a per-application basis is extremely important, of course, so that the HR person can see "skill that we asked for: 5 bullets" right there on the first page.

_dark_matter_ 12y ago
This may be off-topic, but it sure sounds to me like what you're submitting is not a CV but a resume. Those are two different items. CVs are a comprehensive history of yourself and your accomplishments, resumes are short, tailored briefs of why you are fit for the job.
- tehwalrus 12y ago
  in the UK, they're all called CVs.
- cben 12y ago
  Interesting, certainly makes etymological sense. I never realized that, in Israel the two terms are used pretty interchangably. Wikipedia says CVs are much more comprehensive in some countries, esp. North America.

iuguy 12y ago

Funnily enough I've been working on this a lot lately for a book I've been writing[1]. It seems there are several audiences for a CV (recruiter, hiring manager, supporting interviewer) and a fundamental error that people make is writing a CV for more or less than these three types of people. The fundamental truth is that no-one wants to read a CV. They're at best an advert, but people tend to overstuff them or fill them with things irrelevant to the position they're applying for, so they get ditched by people who have tons of them to read through. I have a free email course about career hacking for anyone that subscribes to my book's mailing list. It's focused on people who want to become penetration testers but the career material is applicable to anyone wanting to get into a discipline that they're not already in. [1] - https://www.rawhex.com/ https://www.rawhex.com/

3am 12y ago

A resume is a list of qualifications, and to see how a candidate frames themselves. They also set expectations for me, the interviewer for the questions I would like to ask (they say they're a Node and Clojure expert? I will tailor my questions to verify that). It's also a way (in addition to the cover letter) to quickly judge their communication skills. I wouldn't hire someone without 1) a cover letter 2) a resume 3) a phone screen 4) review of their projects (ie github) 5) a team interview 6) references. Granted, I don't have to do it at scale. It's time consuming, but not as much as a bad hire.

ghaff 12y ago
I tend to agree that a lot of the hate on resumes seems to be missing the point. Sure, if I know or know of someone, maybe a resume doesn't add a whole lot. But they provide: - A first pass at there being some match between experience/background and those needed for the position. - Some guidance for the interview process. Frankly, a lot of the details on the resume don't really matter all that much to me but, overall, it usually gives me a sense of which avenues are worth probing in more detail and which ones I can skip over fairly quickly. Sure, I could draw a lot of this out during the interview but it's easier to read over a couple of pages in advance and spend a few minutes thinking about how to spend the interview slot.

joshyeager 12y ago

I took the survey, and would have done a 20-minute phone screen with five out of the six resumes I got. All six were basically qualified for their roles. That is vastly different from reality. When I post job ads, at least 25% of the resumes I get are completely unlike the job requirements, and another 50% superficially match but are obviously unqualified. The remaining 25% look like the resumes I saw in the survey. When I get resumes from recruiters, I generally don't get any of the "didn't even read the ad" resumes, but I still get about 1/3 obviously unqualified candidates. So overall, a resume filter lets me skip hundreds of useless phone screens or face-to-face interviews. I may lose a few good candidates in that process, but not many. I'm really not sure why this author is trying to use resumes to decide whether to interview these candidates. Once you have them filtered to this level, a quick phone screen gives you much better information than a resume, and doesn't take too much time.

cpach 12y ago

Keep in mind that sending out resumes is not the only way to get a good job. Some relevant previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532886

metacorrector 12y ago

um, "where you went to school" does not matter only to people who didn't go anywhere. when you go to school filled with very smart people you really get used to working with really smart people. I'm not saying it's panacea or even good, it just is. So, when you say "where you went to school" makes no difference in hiring, that tells me more about your hiring culture than it does about the candidates. I got a serious degree in computer science at a serious school, and I'm not hiring people without one, just based on being able to expect a certain baseline for conversations. think of it like high school geometry, Euclidean proofs. It's not necessarily rocket science, it's taught to a vast swath of the population. But imagine a job that required a knowledge of geometry, are you going to look at the resume of somebody "self taught" the same way as somebody who went to the Alexandria Institute of Geometry? Yes, there are many other factors to a complete human being, and a good worker, but one of the valuable things you learn from a good education is how to tease apart complex problems and look at which inputs have what effect on what output (kind of like separation of concerns). I'm am commenting on one aspect of a resume or a hire; pointing out all the other aspects will not dissuade me from my point.

mkremer90 12y ago

I can tell you that I got interviews at 6 "startups" (ranging from garage to multi-million dollars) in San Francisco without giving any of them resumes. And I live in Milwaukee, so they even had to fly me out. Seems like SF is on top of it, Milwaukee on the other hand, only cares about how many years of experience you have. Nothing else.

vishalzone2002 12y ago

I like the article but really if resumes suck then what doesn't. Companies look at resumes for 1-2 minutes on top will they ever have time to browse through hundreds of lines of code, projects, portfolios, etc. I don't think so.