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I screened and interviewed a lot of developers in my last position and it stood out to me that résumé quality seemed to be inversely correlated with the candida

I screened and interviewed a lot of developers in my last position and it stood out to me that résumé quality seemed to be inversely correlated with the candidate's actual ability. I distinctly remember the absolute best developers that I hired also had the most atrociously bad résumés. The candidates with résumés that literally almost knocked me off my chair failed miserably at the most basic programming task.

dexterdog 11y ago
That's largely because so many diamonds get jobs thrown at them and wind up in the "I haven't updated my resume. No worries, just send what you have." They get the interview, knock it out of the park and don't bother to update it.
vonmoltke 11y ago
> I distinctly remember the absolute best developers that I hired also had the most atrociously bad résumés. The candidates with résumés that literally almost knocked me off my chair failed miserably at the most basic programming task. Comments like this make me wonder if one reason for the ridiculously high failure rate in programming interviews is that the resume screening stage is actually acting as a negative filter, that is disproportionately removing the candidates you want and passing the ones you don't.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
Frankly I cannot see an expert in anything other than marketing sitting down and crafting their resume. "Appearance starts where performance ends." Let me illustrate: Growth Engineer One line Resume: "I was employee 7 at Snapchat when we had 6 engineers and 400,000 users. During my tenure as the only growth engineer, our userbase grew to 10 million users over the next 6 months." SEO resume: "I joined XYZ when it was ranking at page 10 for major industry keywords. 9 months later. Google the following keyword BDHDUYD, which accounts for 40% of your market. If you find the company in the top 3 results, we should schedule an interview." Software engineer: I do not know, but I am sure you can insert a short paragraph here.
- rspeer 11y ago
  I am not really sure what you're illustrating with these examples. But I'm guessing you're saying that anybody worth hiring will have a stellar accomplishment where you can look them up by name. This is really not the case. I've found that some people's greatest accomplishments are trade secrets that they can't show you. Some people's greatest accomplishments are in hobbies you don't quite understand. Some people are good at things even though they don't have a heroic narrative of great accomplishments building up to their job application. Meanwhile, people who come in to an interview boasting "Look at this! I did this!" are often just taking credit for what their co-workers did.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > I've found that some people's greatest accomplishments are trade secrets that they can't show you. My greatest accomplishments in the domain I want to work in are trade secrets of the US Government. :) I can talk at length about my current domain, though, which I want to get out of. :P
tgb 11y ago
Hypothesis: good candidates with good resumes get hired by Google, everyone else only can interview the bad candidates with good resumes or other candidates with bad resumes. Therefore selecting for good resumes reduces your chance of finding someone good, unless you're the best employer out there.

dexterdog 11y ago

That's largely because so many diamonds get jobs thrown at them and wind up in the "I haven't updated my resume. No worries, just send what you have." They get the interview, knock it out of the park and don't bother to update it.

vonmoltke 11y ago

> I distinctly remember the absolute best developers that I hired also had the most atrociously bad résumés. The candidates with résumés that literally almost knocked me off my chair failed miserably at the most basic programming task. Comments like this make me wonder if one reason for the ridiculously high failure rate in programming interviews is that the resume screening stage is actually acting as a negative filter, that is disproportionately removing the candidates you want and passing the ones you don't.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

Frankly I cannot see an expert in anything other than marketing sitting down and crafting their resume. "Appearance starts where performance ends." Let me illustrate: Growth Engineer One line Resume: "I was employee 7 at Snapchat when we had 6 engineers and 400,000 users. During my tenure as the only growth engineer, our userbase grew to 10 million users over the next 6 months." SEO resume: "I joined XYZ when it was ranking at page 10 for major industry keywords. 9 months later. Google the following keyword BDHDUYD, which accounts for 40% of your market. If you find the company in the top 3 results, we should schedule an interview." Software engineer: I do not know, but I am sure you can insert a short paragraph here.

rspeer 11y ago
I am not really sure what you're illustrating with these examples. But I'm guessing you're saying that anybody worth hiring will have a stellar accomplishment where you can look them up by name. This is really not the case. I've found that some people's greatest accomplishments are trade secrets that they can't show you. Some people's greatest accomplishments are in hobbies you don't quite understand. Some people are good at things even though they don't have a heroic narrative of great accomplishments building up to their job application. Meanwhile, people who come in to an interview boasting "Look at this! I did this!" are often just taking credit for what their co-workers did.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > I've found that some people's greatest accomplishments are trade secrets that they can't show you. My greatest accomplishments in the domain I want to work in are trade secrets of the US Government. :) I can talk at length about my current domain, though, which I want to get out of. :P

tgb 11y ago

Hypothesis: good candidates with good resumes get hired by Google, everyone else only can interview the bad candidates with good resumes or other candidates with bad resumes. Therefore selecting for good resumes reduces your chance of finding someone good, unless you're the best employer out there.