Live data from Hacker News

We created a fake language to root out resume liars

facebook.com

591–600 of 771 posts

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one should bother to apply since they don't qualify instantly. I never assume the "requirements" are actually hard requirements to an application, and I encourage others in the job market to do the same. Sure, if you miss 3 out of the 5 requirements listed you might pass on that application. But if you've got 4 out of the 5 requirements, and think you could accomplish the job as described, you should still stron…

Be aware when you do this that there are a minority of companies for whom the requirements are actually requirements, and you may get yelled at by an interviewer for "wasting everybody's time." Yes, this has happened to me. On the up side I now have a list of a few companies I know I won't work for unless I'm desperate. The advice is still good; the requirements are really more of "strong desire" than actual requirem…

> and you may get yelled at by an interviewer for "wasting everybody's time."

They had an opportunity to evaluate your resume or CV before inviting you in for an interview. If it was a hard requirement for them, they shouldn't have invited you in for an interview. The only time you're really wasting is the time of the person who is screening resumes.

> Yes, this has happened to me. On the up side I now have a list of a few companies I know I won't work for unless I'm desperate.

I'm sorry that happened to you! What a terrible experience. It's definitely good to keep that list of places you know you should avoid.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#592

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and ma…

> Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me

I once refused to let a recruiter send my resume to this company because I thought the company was slimey (it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government)

The recuriter started getting angry at me, so I made it clear I would not work with someone who didn't respect me, and hung up. A recruiter who views you as simply a product to sell is not worth keeping. There's a million recruiters.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#593

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

I meet couple of recruiters who insist on me sending them CV as DOC. I tell them that I have carefully typeset my CV in LaTeX in PDF and I am not willing to rewrite it to Word. Usually this is the end of it and they just take my PDF.

I have once been on an interview and interviewer pulled out my CV, obviously horribly mangled in Word. I told him that no, this isn't my CV and that I take too much pride in whatever I make including my CV to make such horribly looking document.

I have once met recruiter who insisted I rewrite my CV to include description of my experience with everything that was listed in the ad. I told them that this is my CV and it already lists a lot of stuff and it doesn't make sense for me to list obvious things (like knowledge of Excel) or things I have no experience with and that in general the CV is about me and not about the ad contents. I got no reply.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#594

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

We interviewed a person a number of years ago now in a similar boat.

We'd asked him how proficient he was with a number of technologies he'd listed on his resume, and he didn't seem to know what any of them were.

Finally, frustrated, we asked him why he'd put these things on his resume. He said "my recruiter told me to". Sigh. I don't know for certain but I believe we didn't work with that recruiter again.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#595

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

>The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end

It is. Have you filled out an online job application lately? I've abandoned multiple opportunities when I was directed to an online application that looked like it was written in the 1990s and literally asked me to rekey every bit of info that is already on my CV. There's no reason for a job application to ask for anything other than name and email with a button to upload your CV in this day and age.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#596
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and ma…

> Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me I once refused to let a recruiter send my resume to this company because I thought the company was slimey (it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government) The recuriter…

[deleted]

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#597
post #573
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother? Apparently everyone keeps forgetting that PDFs are editable.

It's really not made to be and with the exception of an embedded file that's actually editable (eg: LibreOffice optionally keeping an ODT version inside the PDF), "editing" a PDF tends to be a disaster of trying to match the layout with whatever text you are attempting to edit. Certain tools, such as Word and LibreOffice, make it a bit easier as most of the source text is in the document, others like LaTeX end up loo…

Does the PDF contain the whole font in such a way that anyone can add text in that font? I ask because I use uw-garamond from the Mathdesign package.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#598

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

This happened to me as well. I am so glad I had a copy of my CV with me that I could hand over.

The recruiter had copy and pasted from my perfectly formatted LaTeX typeset resume and changed what I did and when. They were looking for someone to help them migrate from one system to another and I didn't have experience in the first to help with that.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version. This doesn't always help either though. I have only ever sent PDFs to recruiters for this reason. Yet I have still had a recruiter completely rewrite my resume and add false information. I generally keep a resume on me when I go to an interview just in case an interviewer had not seen it. I'm glad I do that.

I was doing some interviews and the resumes we were getting were like 5+ pages long. Maybe it was some cultural difference or something but I'd always been told to keep my resume to 1 page front & back at the absolute longest. Turns out it was a different resume that the recruiters would send us. They were garbage in quality and I hate them. Fuck recruiters.

It's not cultural. I think the agencies are trying to put in every single keyword and "skill" to get past algorithmic filters and also make sure non-technical managers see the words they are looking for.

At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie Chart Tableau", etc.

After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake. I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After that they sign a contract with one of them."

The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or have anybody in their group that does X. For all they know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.

I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of course, those people were curated by the agency after I made my comment.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The whole recruitment process seems broken " The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in the and, the market might have collapsed already. ""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and…

Do you think this would explain the status of places like LinkedIn? Long ago, it was an OK place to have an online CV. Now it is a place people use show off with non-relevant _stuff_.

I don't know. I deleted my Linkedin Account long time ago.

People receive a lot of BS on Linkedin but for some people it works. This being said, the people I know whit 8-9 fig net worth, you wont find on linkedin.

Post reply on HN