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We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

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Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#641

Post by markshead »

astura wrote: post #403
markshead wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically if you have an organization that only talks to people with current jobs, that rule is for people sending in cold resumes. On the other hand, if they know who you are, you probably won't have the same filters applied. Let's say you go ahead and move and take time off to watch your child. Two years down the road you want to start looking for work. What you've done with those two years is going to really matte…

God, what a terribly insensitive comment. Leaving the workforce to care for family is not "check[ing] out for 24 months."

I'm in no way implying that taking care of your children is less important than your career. I think it is great what he is talking about doing and is a great investment to make in his child.

Leaving the workforce to take care of family and not doing anything to keep yourself marketable is "checking out" when it comes to your career. You are going to have to be proactive in making sure that you are doing things each week that will put you in a good place to return to the workforce IF that is what you eventually want to do.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#642

Post by markshead »

ksenzee wrote: post #411
markshead wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically if you have an organization that only talks to people with current jobs, that rule is for people sending in cold resumes. On the other hand, if they know who you are, you probably won't have the same filters applied. Let's say you go ahead and move and take time off to watch your child. Two years down the road you want to start looking for work. What you've done with those two years is going to really matte…

> What you've done with those two years is going to really matter. Caring for their child is what he'll have done with those two years. It's an exhausting full-time job. These suggestions are great for someone who's unemployed, but unrealistic for a full-time caregiver.

Well there were a lot of suggestions and there are plenty of other things one could do that I didn't suggest. Your chances of getting a job after 24 months having done absolutely nothing related to your career are much lower than if you do some things like I mentioned--even if you are only spending 10-15 hours or so a month on it.

I'm not downplaying how much work it takes to care for a child, but I don't think it is helpful to downplay the need to stay at least somewhat active in your field if you want to back to the workforce someday.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#644

Post by jtmcmc »

godelski wrote: post #510
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean much since tooling like Sphinx will generate Latex as an intermediary for PDF generation. I don't care for the rigidity of Latex and don't want to hand craft my own TeX documents. I once had a resume generation system that would convert ReST to Docbook and from there used XSLT to produce plain text, docx, and PDF output using XSL-FO. Sadly the code was on a failed Seagate drive and is lost. And yes I had…

Honestly I've never understood people's problem with LaTeX, where everyone says it si "hand crafted". Honestly just grab a template. Maybe modify it a little and tweak it, but then save that skeleton. Have one for a resume, research papers, other docs, etc and you're golden. You have to do the same thing in Word too, the difference is in LaTeX it looks like code. But IMO LaTeX looks nicer than Word every time. I can…

also you can always use lyx if you don't want to write a whole bunch of raw LaTeX

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#645

Post by setr »

regulation_d wrote: post #614
cwyers wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applicants do not self-filter. If you've ever read resumes for a job listing that haven't been prescreened, you'll be blown away by how many people refuse to self-filter even for basic fitness for the job. Put out a job listing asking for a college degree, and you'll get applicants who are still in school with their graduation date two years in the future looking for an internship. That's an extreme, but people will…

As an applicant, I don't self-filter from positions I think are interesting, because I've gotten several offers from companies after to applying to jobs I wasn't technically qualified for. Some companies are pretty strict about their qualifications. For some, the qualifications are more like guidelines. But if the position is interesting, I'll take that chance.

and for some, they're just nonsensical. Like when you see 5 years min. experience with Swift

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#646

Post by setr »

mikeash wrote: post #513
jdgiese wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it indicates carelessness in the hiring process Perhaps we are using the word careless differently, but I don't see how using heuristics like this implies carelessness on behalf of the employer. If anything, it seems to indicate that the employer is making a well-reasoned choice to balance economic constraints with company values. I run a small software consulting firm and have now hired three people (not too m…

Do you have other people proofread and spellcheck all of your external communication?

I couldn't care less if I make a typo in HN; But an email to my professor, I'll review several times without even thinking about it. Probably won't get someone else to proofread it, but that's because I trust my own competence in reviewing my own short texts, and in writing English.

But my friends from India, they'll send me emails to proofread if its important, because, y'know, it's sensible, correct and most importantly, it's polite to do so.

It seems absurd to me that the significance of typos needs to be defended; Maybe the treatment of resumes as any more important than a text message, but if we assume it's important, then why the hell would you let something as simple as typos through easily?

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#647

Post by aeorgnoieang »

asveikau wrote: post #586
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Did some Linux kernel hacking in spare time, have been a home user of different *BSDs for ~17 years, learned C on Unix.. none of this you can tell from my resume) Maybe you should add that stuff to your resume. I include 'skills' that weren't necessarily relevant to any particular job.

I think such a section would likely be ignored or not understood, and the problem being described is that people brand you as this or that based on work experience. People may even consider it a red flag that you list skills you didn't work with in your most recent position.

Most people with which I've interviewed recently seem to understand that lots of tech people do significant work outside of their formal employment.

But I also wasn't imagining a separate section. I have a "skills" section and that's where I'd imagine adding the things about which I was responding.

> People may even consider it a red flag that you list skills you didn't work with in your most recent position.

I could understand this somewhat if someone had been at their most recent position for a decade but for anything less than that it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to include things one might not have used, or used frequently, at the single most recent position.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#648

Post by mikeash »

setr wrote: post #646
mikeash wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have other people proofread and spellcheck all of your external communication?

I couldn't care less if I make a typo in HN; But an email to my professor, I'll review several times without even thinking about it. Probably won't get someone else to proofread it, but that's because I trust my own competence in reviewing my own short texts, and in writing English. But my friends from India, they'll send me emails to proofread if its important, because, y'know, it's sensible, correct and most import…

I can see that it's good to avoid typos. But at the same time, why the hell are you judging the suitability of a professional in a complex technical field based on typos in something they only write once every few years?

The argument for the latter seems to be circular: we reject people on that basis because typos indicate a broader lack of care, which they indicate because we reject people on that basis.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#649

Post by malvosenior »

s73ver_ wrote: post #636
malvosenior wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic every decision made during the hiring is a policy. Too vague to be useful imo. Semantics aside, my point stands: it’s reasonable to hire the best person for the job. A person’s personal problems are just that, personal.

I'm sorry, but that just tells me you've never been in that kind of situation. Which tells me that you lack empathy for other people.

And your response tells me that you’re not a hiring manager and have never been responsible for building a team.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#650

Post by setr »

mikeash wrote: post #648
setr wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't care less if I make a typo in HN; But an email to my professor, I'll review several times without even thinking about it. Probably won't get someone else to proofread it, but that's because I trust my own competence in reviewing my own short texts, and in writing English. But my friends from India, they'll send me emails to proofread if its important, because, y'know, it's sensible, correct and most import…

I can see that it's good to avoid typos. But at the same time, why the hell are you judging the suitability of a professional in a complex technical field based on typos in something they only write once every few years? The argument for the latter seems to be circular: we reject people on that basis because typos indicate a broader lack of care, which they indicate because we reject people on that basis.

Its mostly a question of where to spend effort; In the same way I'm probably not going to read a paper with a shoddily written abstract, unless external reasons apply (ie the paper was recommended to me by someone trustworthy), it doesn't make sense for me to try to parse a shoddily written resume.

It takes more effort to do so, and its nonsensical for the person not to put effort into it, because its only written once ebery few years, and because its the first point of contact.

If you're going to operate at the level of a tenth grader, why would I assume you have anything more to offer than what a tenth grader might?

Of course the metric might fail, but hey, there's a hundred other resumes to have to go through too, and you managed to imply you're incompetent right off the bat, so I'm probably better off looking elsewhere.

Theres also the aspect that I personally don't want to put up with shoddy writing, and also the fact that these are not long documents. Its like 1-3 pages half-sentences and spacing everywhere; I'm hardly asking the world of you by requiring you bother verifying what you write.

>But at the same time, why the hell are you judging the suitability of a professional in a complex technical field based on typos in something they only write once every few years

Because, with the exception of some rare positions, there are a lot of people suitable for the job. There are also a lot of people who will apply without being suitable. And a lot of the people who apply at random, aka sloppily, are presumably also sloppy about the rest of the process.

So filtering on sloppiness is probably a decent utility; of course it'll remove the sloppy suitable candidates, and it won't remove the non-sloppy unsuitable candidates, but hey.

Alternatively we can do modern hr stuff like filtering resumes on key-word searches, so if you're an expert in Oracle 11d but not Oracle 11e....

Every filter is fucked somehow; but typos seem to me one of the least fucked, precisely because its so easy to avoid. You only write it once every few years.

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