He who submits a resume has already lost

This is just more of the same thing the author was complaining about.

I'll offer a counter view from my (annoyingly large) experience interviewing and hiring; I would ignore such statements on a CV at best, and depending on how much a candidate bets on this strategy, it might even work to their disadvantage.

I need smart people that want to work and are willing to do that work with my team; I don't want or need someone to promote the party line, that's why we have Sales and Brand teams, I need people who for some amount of time are willing to spend their time and skills on our problem sets. Our problem sets aren't so unique, so I also want them to stick around for awhile (not forever, that's unrealistic). Finally, I need and want people that can at least be cordial with the existing team as opposed to disrupting it.

If I ask my colleagues who also decide on hiring, probably they'd have different wants and needs, maybe echoing the parent post, I don't know for sure. There's what my colleagues say and then what they think when deciding. It's a crap shoot for the candidates for sure, and I'm very sympathetic to this; it's also a crap shoot for us as it means that depending on who takes the interview, a different set of criteria is being used, so it's a real risk; autocratizing isn't good either because then it means higher chances we can't evolve the team.

Hiring is a real mess, and I have no good answer on making it better, just that it needs to be. The short list of problems I think are pretty universal for candidates and employers includes:

- It's an inefficient and time consuming process for all

- It encourages both sides to lie to each other for legal reasons and because it's the only way to get attention

- It's too easy for misinformation/weak points to cloud the process with misinformation, intentionally or otherwise

- Everyone has to make decisions based on incomplete and often inaccurate information

- The interests of employers and candidates are set up to be at odds, even though it shouldn't be this way (salaries, benefits, demands on time/skills, emotional costs, etc)

With CVs/resumes, I probably spend no more than 2-5 minutes on them, and it's usually with ctrl+f to hunt down the keywords for skills we identified would solve our problem set and to give me something to talk with the candidate about during the interview, and the interview is mostly to figure out "does this candidate actually have relevant experience here or it's just keyword spamming?"

I'm very lucky that at least one of our Talent Acquisition teams is quite good and their initial interviews/screenings have a higher success rate than the other TA teams, so I've come to rely on that a lot, but it's still difficult as the TA team are not technical persons, and despite their earnest interest (and KPIs) to get us in touch with good candidates, mistakes happen.

I really wonder what hiring would look like if work wasn't a requirement for people to survive, that is, in a world with universal income and guaranteed living. The work still needs to be done, but the candidates in this scenario have a much different incentive since their literal livelihood doesn't depend on them getting the job. My hope is that it would mean candidates choose to apply because of their genuine interest, and the type of problems the company tries to solve suddenly become a much more competitive currency we barter with. I think some might say that it already is like that, but I think that's an incomplete understanding of how hiring has worked for a very long time.

So I'm really not sure how to make it better and more efficient, and how to get past the awful situation we have now; I hope that removing the "you need this job to survive" can gain traction and make it better, but the cynic in me says this isn't likely in my life time.

For the time being, what I would recommend for technical candidates is the following:

1. Be cordial with the recruiters. You don't have to suck up to them, but if you can't at least be cordial with them, I have low hopes you are going to be cordial with the people you need to work with every day. The recruiters have their guidance on what we're looking for and yes it's going to be basic and limited stuff I told them to check out; they aren't going to understand everything about our tech and work naturally, but what they're screening is the basic stuff that they can understand so that I don't have to check these basics. They want you hired also remember, because it is their job to get people hired; at least the TA teams I like are constantly advocates for candidates they think have a chance, so don't burn bridges with the persons who are sticking up for you internally†

2. Keep your CV relevant and concise. Concise doesn't mean short, write what you think we're interested in, but make it parsable. I want to be able to understand what tech you've worked with, your responsibilities regarding it, and to have some items for us to talk about. Hundreds of bullet points or listed items doesn't help me if it buries the relevant experiences for me under layers of irrelevant experiences. Length, specific words/phrases, it's not as important even for the auto-screening tools. Just take a small amount of time to make it well formatted, free of typos, and it's likely fine. Freebie CV generators are perfectly fine, and preferable to CV templates in Word or other hand rolled CVs. Length doesn't matter as we're just going to ctrl+f anyways.

3. Make it clear what problem sets you're interested in, and during the interview, ask questions so that you understand if our problem sets and day to day are among your interests. I'm usually happy to talk about our day to day pretty directly so that you have a complete picture on what you're applying if it means

4. Just be cordial during the interview; I don't need people to flatter me or the company, and I just need to see you can work with the team; I don't learn that from hearing how great the company is.

† I'm fully aware that many Talent Acquisition Teams are quite awful, and many recruiters are not like I described here; nevertheless, they are often still the only advocate you'll have unless you know someone on the inside. I think most hiring managers rely heavily on their TA teams regardless of how good they are, so at least be cordial with recruiters.

Not to mention that a 20% delusional rate is pretty unlikely - more like 50-75% in my experience.

While I am no stranger to interacting with developers who seem to only be in the industry because of how well it pays, I find your advice frustrating. My experience with startups is that they demand a lot of A) interest from the candidate immediately, before the candidate has even talked to a human, and B) attention from the candidate- but that same interest and attention is not returned to the candidate. Thinking about the startups I interviewed with in the last couple of years (all via TripleByte fwiw), I have noticed the following patterns:

- The founders/cofounders think they have come up with the best idea ever, when objectively the idea is novel but garbage (usually a solution looking for a problem), and only want to hire people eager to smell their farts all day long (and probably on some nights and weekends, too).

- The interview process is unnecessarily complicated, despite the supposed ahead-of-time vetting done by TripleByte (which used to tout "skip to the final interview", but in reality is "skip the computer-graded, timed Leetcode Easy brain teaser"). In the worst-case, a company had me interview with 4 different people throughout the week, give a 15-minute presentation on a coding project I worked on, and then they expected me to work nights and weekends for an entire week to "test drive" me (the irony here is that while they get an idea of what it's like to have me as an employee, I don't really get to see what it's like to work for them as a company - it's not like I am in their Slack channels or participating in meetings.

- The pay isn't that great. Again, the founders are delusional, think it would be a real privilege for anyone to work for them, and seem to believe that they cannot be too selective. "Give me a candidate who has familiarity with NodeJS on the backend and [Scala/Ruby/Go/Rust] (because why not), is willing and able to work nights and weekends (but it's okay because we offer uNliMiTeD PTO), all for the generous, generous salary of $130k/year.

If you don't draw parallels between these and Wundergraph, kudos, but with each of the startups I interviewed with, I could feel myself becoming more and more jaded until I just gave up. A year later I'm still at my current job, and I'm glad I stayed, but I put a lot of energy into those interviews, hours spent even before I had my first interview, just researching the company, looking at their code (if any of it was public) and coming up with thoughtful questions. Why did these four companies not want to give me a job offer? I'm not sure. It could certainly be cultural more than technical. Despite my cynical attitude now, I promise you I came into each interview with enthusiasm, respect, and genuine interest in the role.

I was also sure they all knew where to find my LinkedIn, Medium, StackOverflow and Github profiles, which all give insight into my abilities and (I think) prove I enjoy writing code and building stuff, and most importantly, that I could probably handle whatever frontend-for-a-database app they were building. Let's be real, most apps aren't that complicated.

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