Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We created a fake language to root out resume liars

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 771 posts

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

#731

Post by ficklepickle »

obmelvin wrote: post #508
ficklepickle wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But can you code in API? I don't want your life story, just answer me! Do you know API?!" I'm so lucky, I think I found the best recruiter in all Vancouver. He helped me get my ideal role and was generally kind and competent. Just to offset the horror stories.

How did you find your recruiter? Do you mind sharing the rough process that unfolded? Not asking for you to share them, just wondering if there are any takeaways you would have for others on the process.

No prob. He actually had a position advertised on roberthalf.ca.

The position seemed right up my alley. The directions part explained he was the recruiter for this position, and to reach out on LinkedIn first. So, I did that. I guess it was a pre-screen to see if I read directions.

He accepted the request but didn't respond to my message for a few days. I'm really not good at self promotion, but I also really wanted to get his attention. I saw that he posted regularly to LinkedIn and also engaged with a lot of posts. So I posted a cool side project[0] to LinkedIn that I had recently done. I was feeling pretty exasperated, I think I wrote something like "if i will do this just for fun, imagine what I will do if you hire me." I don't necessarily recommend that exact approach, but he did notice it and that is what got the ball rolling. Thankfully he thought it was cool, because it is a little bit edgy. I was looking for a smaller company that valued a hacker mindset, so it was a bit of a filter as well I suppose.

We immediately hit it off. He seemed to understand what I was all about, which is cool. I'm an aspie and a lot of ppl just don't get me. He has over 20 years experience so he really knows his stuff and he was just nice and down to earth.

I got extra lucky because he was friends with the hiring manager for 20 years, they worked in the game industry together in the 90s.

I'm not capable of generating any takeaways currently, as I am real tired, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Hopefully my response was vaguely coherent and at least tangentially related to your question. Sleep time!

Edit: Forgot link! [0] https://jeremypoole.ca/posts/evofinder/

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

#732

Post by isolli »

mos_basik wrote: post #349
isolli wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I hope you enjoy it :) And I really don't recommend reading the Black Swan, especially after reading Fooled by Randomness!

I'm interested in why you hold that opinion of Black Swan. I just read it a couple of months back because I figured I probably owed reading some Taleb as back table stakes for all the hours I've spent reading HN (and SSC). Picked Black Swan because it seemed to be the most well known and I've never liked jumping into a series with the most recent release. I enjoyed it, will read more of him, but haven't yet. Do you h…

Fooled by Randomness was written first. I found it quite insightful. Having read it, the Black Swan felt like a rehash of the same ideas, while the narrator (Taleb) comes across as particularly insufferable.

If you've read the Black Swan already that's fine. My recommendation is mostly addressed to those who have read neither.

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

#733

Post by solveit »

dmos62 wrote: post #480
jason0597 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think HN has been recently overtaken by a lot of very neoliberal people who preach unregulated capitalism very hard.

A world where basic income isn't downvoted, but strong trade unions or anti-trust laws are is a weird one.

We think unions and laws tend to distort markets much more than honest straight cash transfers.

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

#734

Post by fakedang »

ficklepickle wrote: post #458
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something I've noticed over the last 10 years or so as job descriptions get longer. All those new terms like React, Vue, SaaS, Azure, AWS etc. They don't really know what they mean. I was asked if I could code in Azure. This led to a weird conversation where I was trying to explain what Azure was, whilst he wouldn't listen to me and was adamant that it was a programming language.

"But can you code in API? I don't want your life story, just answer me! Do you know API?!" I'm so lucky, I think I found the best recruiter in all Vancouver. He helped me get my ideal role and was generally kind and competent. Just to offset the horror stories.

Haha, reminds me of that FastApi guy's interaction with hiring reqs.

"5+ years experience in using Fastapi"

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

#735

Post by goatinaboat »

cptskippy wrote: post #560
falcolas wrote: post #332

So, let me get this straight - you lie about your job requirements, but get all bent out of shape when the candidates lie right back at you? Brilliant. I can’t think of a better example of why hiring is broken; of how unequal the power dynamic is between employers and employees.

These are the games played when Recruiters and HR are involved in the solicitation of resumes. HR will demand 20 years Swift experience, and Recruiters will pad your resume with 30 years. Most experienced interviewees will show up to a face-to-face with copies of their resume in hand because of the way Recruiters fudge things.

Most experienced interviewees will show up to a face-to-face with copies of their resume in hand because of the way Recruiters fudge things.

I had learnt this by my second or third job, I can't believe that other industries operate this way, doctors, lawyers, accountants, civil engineers, etc.

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

#736

Post by goatinaboat »

3minus1 wrote: post #634
falcolas wrote: post #332

So, let me get this straight - you lie about your job requirements, but get all bent out of shape when the candidates lie right back at you? Brilliant. I can’t think of a better example of why hiring is broken; of how unequal the power dynamic is between employers and employees.

It's not that bad. Real hypocrisy would be lying about how great the job is to get better candidates, and then getting upset when the candidates lie about how qualified they are to get better jobs.

Real hypocrisy would be lying about how great the job is to get better candidates, and then getting upset when the candidates lie about how qualified they are to get better jobs.

This happens a lot - it was a running joke for a while, it seemed that every recruiters was touting "functional programming" for what were actually very normal corporate software jobs, with the promise that if you just did a few years of Java then maybe, maybe the company would think about Clojure one day in the future!

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

#737

Post by krageon »

brigandish wrote: post #77

> 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 and has been for a while.

Exactly this. The most depressing thing to me is that whenever I suggest to my colleagues that 99% of the work we'd hire someone for anyone with half a brain could learn in a few weeks (I work in an office for a big company), they still insist on listing all sorts of required skills. Even though the people we land with job adverts like that don't usually have the skills and then get hired anyway.

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

#738

Post by NullPrefix »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #148
NullPrefix wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only sending PDFs sounds like a an easy way to weed this category out.

As mentioned in another post on this thread, a lot of recruiters will happily copy/paste from your PDF to their template.

Level 2 would be a jpeg, I guess.

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

#739

Post by dmos62 »

Cd00d wrote: post #676
dmos62 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, Greenknight gets his head lobed off, but he then puts it back on. The scary part is that in a year's time he'll get to return the favor (but doesn't, because it was a test of chivalry (and the protagonist was chivalrous)). Wikipedia has a synopsis.

>Greenknight gets his head lobed off Brilliant typo

It's supposed to be "loped off", right?

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

#740

Post by tener »

flukus wrote: post #680
tener wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, sure a C# dev can do Java and get up to speed with it pretty quickly, but certainly a proper Java dev will be more productive immediately. Knowledge of frameworks is a real skill for example.

The frameworks are typically very analogous between the two as well, it takes a while to learn them but in the meantime it's googling "how to do concept x in framework y". Apart from the initial project setup you're also generally spending a lot less time dealing with the framework and instead looking at other code.

Analogous != same. The differences can easily cost a large fraction of productivity for a certain period of time (a couple of months?).

Would I hire a bright candidate that require retraining given absence of those that do not? Quite likely yes.

Would I be pissed at false advertising? Again, yes.

Post reply on HN