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He who submits a resume has already lost

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Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#81

Post by ajsnigrutin »

andrewstuart wrote: post #10
jensneuse wrote: post #7

I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero. Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English. 1. Why do you want to take this role? 2. Why are you a good fit fo…

This attitude is well suited to an employers market in which you need to profess your love for the job and company as part of your job application. A pity the market has turned back this direction. It’s usually accompanied by an employer “looking for someone who loves the opportunity enough to go through our 12 week, 9 interview, 1 whiteboard, 2 coding test process which usually ends in veto and ghosting”. Like telli…

Yep, especially since the answer the the first question ("1. Why do you want to take this role?") is usually:

"you have work to do, and have the money, I can do the work, and want the money"

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#82

Post by oxfordmale »

jensneuse wrote: post #21
andrewstuart wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude is well suited to an employers market in which you need to profess your love for the job and company as part of your job application. A pity the market has turned back this direction. It’s usually accompanied by an employer “looking for someone who loves the opportunity enough to go through our 12 week, 9 interview, 1 whiteboard, 2 coding test process which usually ends in veto and ghosting”. Like telli…

I understand where you're coming from, but see it differently. This really is a filter. We don't want job applications from people who are looking for a job. We're looking for people who actually want to do work at WunderGraph. We're the first to build a Backend for Frontend Framework, unifying the ideas of API Gateway, BFF and package manager. Our long term goal is to build the GitHub for APIs, a collaborative platf…

The cynical truth is that no one is that excited to work at Wundergraph. Once your revenue drops, you will make your staff redundant.

I am sure your employees love to to work with your other colleagues on an exciting problem, however, it is just a paycheck in the end.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#83

Post by anothernewdude »

jensneuse wrote: post #7

I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero. Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English. 1. Why do you want to take this role? 2. Why are you a good fit fo…

Resumes are the thing I look through. Cover letters are discarded before reading.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#84

Post by anothernewdude »

jensneuse wrote: post #22
datatrashfire wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGpt I need a cover letter for a startup. Here is the plaintext contents of their website...

In the interview, we'll ask in the first minutes what's your opinion of what we do. ChatGPT will not get you that far. After all, what's the point of faking interest? Eventually you'll never really get the job. All you do is waste everybody's time.

So you give jobs only to those able to feign interest. I'm not sure that's worthwhile.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#85

Post by antonvs »

frrae wrote: post #73
cornholio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't want job applications from people who are looking for a job. We're looking for people who actually want to do work > We're not offering you a job. We offer you the opportunity This gem right here sums up what an employers market means. Every employer thinks they are special and wants an employee who's entire life's journey was only a preparation for the singular great moment of meeting you and building you…

You are indirectly making a great case for requiring that applicants consider the company more that "just a job". If my coworkers ranted like that, I'd not have fun at my work and you'd be dragging morale down. I spend 8-10 hours a day at my job. That's far more than with any of my friends and typically more than even with my spouse in the average week. My coworkers, at least a significant fraction, better be amazing…

> dude, it's just a job, leave me alone, I leave them to their misery.

If you really believed what you were saying you wouldn’t have to rationalize it to yourself by claiming that people who don’t think like you must be miserable.

> Cause let's face it, co-workers are a friends substitute in this day and age.

That’s on you. If you’re using coworkers as a friends substitute it’s not surprising you get people who want you to leave them alone.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#86

Post by jensneuse »

jensneuse wrote: post #7

I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero. Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English. 1. Why do you want to take this role? 2. Why are you a good fit fo…

Some people mis-read this post as "showing" love to a company in the application. This is not what I meant, so I'd like to clarify this with a story.

Prior to starting WunderGraph, I've worked for a Full Lifecycle API Management company. It's was my best paying and most satisfying job before cutting my salary almost half to make my startup burn as little as possible.

I found this company because they had an open source codebase, written in Go. Coincidentally, I've built a library (https://github.com/wundergraph/graphql-go-tools) to build GraphQL API gateways, also written in go. At that time, they were only supporting REST. So I wrote them and offered the opportunity to add GraphQL to their API management capabilities. That was it, perfect match. Fast forward 2.5 years later and they have all sorts of powerful GraphQL API management capabilities. I think it was great for everyone involved.

So it's not about loving s company or a cult or anything. It's a about finding a good match between candidate and employer, and making it super easy for the employer to "spot" that from the very beginning.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#87

Post by chocolatkey »

gymbeaux wrote: post #54
chocolatkey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a jaded interviewer (and interviewee) in tech, I will say this works great if you have, for example, a face-to-face meeting and you can demonstrate your interest/passion for the role, but in cover letters or similar email exchanges, you already have people spitting out those fake statements, and it's tedious to distinguish the genuine interest from the fake "I am interested in because you and believe I am a perfec…

There has to be a better way. I really think TripleByte was on to something. No other profession has such a convoluted interviewing system. Imagine if doctors were expected to perform surgeries in X minutes in order to prove they were qualified for the job? Imagine if a lawyer had to prove they graduated from law school by defending a random felon in a court setting. No other profession in existence expects candidate…

Just to be clear since you replied to my comment, coding demonstrations are almost never a part of my interview process. That's not the part I was complaining about. Once I have narrowed down the potential applicants to a few, I do 15-30m interviews where we talk about things on their resume (e.g. "how did you solve X problem at Y job?") or list of skills (e.g. "how would you do task A with tech B?"), and their reason for applying. So far, I've only needed to have one round of interviews like that, because I usually get that one candidate that is best suited for the job.

The part I was complaining about is narrowing down the pool in the first place, the pre-screening, the part you mention:

> Why can't employers look at the plethora of code-related stuff with my name attacked to it that's out there on the Internet [...]

You wish (and I wish). The answer is because everything that can be gamed will eventually be. Each time I'm hiring it gets worse. Examples:

- GitHub profiles are still a decent filtering system, but people have learned how to game that with hello world-esque repositories in the area of interest. So you have to take a really close look at the actual content of the repositories themselves. Sometimes they have complicated file structures, lots of files, commits etc., then you have to actually look at the code and find it's just a "baby's first app" copied from some tutorial on how to game GitHub repos for the interview. They also plaster their GitHub bio with all these stickers and icons and programming languages copied from some templates on how to make your GitHub look attractive.

- Resumes are getting to be worse, a certain class of people say they worked for 5 different Fortune 500 companies, thankfully they all use the same template so you can filter them out. Others just keep lying over and over or embellishing their experience so hard it's basically a lie. If you're trained at it, you can filter them out because you notice patterns, similarities etc. but if you're hiring for something that you don't have experience in then it's getting harder and harder to distinguish. Sadly it's caused me to automatically assuming someone from certain countries are BSing it if their resume sets off my BS meter in any way.

- I used to use Discord communities related to something I was hiring for with a #jobs channel (for example, Flutter), but those "gamers" have figured that out too, and now when you post there, you get a bunch of BS applicants. You can sometimes tell because they don't really bother setting a profile pic or anything for their Discord, so you know they probably just joined to game the system.

All in all, when the application process is over, I am ending up feeling more and more irritated at the amount of time I have wasted filtering and filtering and filtering.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#88

Post by derbOac »

IshKebab wrote: post #19
elihu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking back on my life, I can't remember a single example where I ever got a job just by submitting a resume. Either I already knew someone in the organization or otherwise had a relationship with it to begin with (e.g. I got a summer grounds job at a University because I was already a student there), or I met someone at an event who was looking for people to hire.

Except my most recent job where I used a recruiter, I've only got jobs by submitting a CV. One was a huge company with an official application process (Dyson) and the other two were startups via email. You definitely have higher odds with a more nepotistic route, but I think he's still right - most jobs go to applicants that apply using the standard process.

My experience is sort of in-between on both sides. That is, there's some submission process people go through, but connections of some sort definitely draw attention to some applicants more than others. Sometimes someone is brought in with no obvious connections, but sometimes someone is basically brought in sidestepping the open process too. Usually it's a bit of both, leaning towards connections of some kind. Sometimes the interviewers or interviewees aren't aware of the connection, although usually one of them is.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#89

Post by Ekaros »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #81
andrewstuart wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude is well suited to an employers market in which you need to profess your love for the job and company as part of your job application. A pity the market has turned back this direction. It’s usually accompanied by an employer “looking for someone who loves the opportunity enough to go through our 12 week, 9 interview, 1 whiteboard, 2 coding test process which usually ends in veto and ghosting”. Like telli…

Yep, especially since the answer the the first question ("1. Why do you want to take this role?") is usually: "you have work to do, and have the money, I can do the work, and want the money"

If I truly loved your vision or product or something or believed in it, I probably would start my own competition. If I want to invest in it why not go all in.

But I don't. So it is a transaction and you are one in hundreds of options I have over years. And you should also treat it like that.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#90

Post by version_five »

ehutch79 wrote: post #29
leipert wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point. But when you go through hundreds of applications for a single role, the ones with a cover letter do stand out. Not that I would only hire if you had a cover letter, but it still stands out. One hand folks complain about automatic scanning and rejection based on just the CVs and here we are complaining about the one instrument, a job seeker has, to express interest in the company. To go with your dat…

It’s not the cover letter that’s really the problem here. It’s the cult like exuberance that seems to be demands by GP and sibling comments.

I didn't see any cult like exuberance. I used to hire and the "cover letter" criteria I had was basically looking for some hint they were deliberately applying for this job because it interested them. That's what I get from the OP. It's not about looking for someone who's pretending they've found their life's passion. It's about preferring people who (hopefully honestly) indicate this would be something they'd want to do because of some fit between them and the job. That's not a burdensome, not cultish requirement.

As an aside, I saw a cool job not long ago where they wanted your application email to have the subject line "$demonym reporting for duty", where $demonym is the cutesy name, like metamate that employees were supposed to call themselves. That is cultish, and puts me off applying way more than being asked for an sentence on why I'm a fit for the job.

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