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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

#101

Post by mihaaly »

I like this writing about the necessary evil of resumes and processes around employment, when have to resort to people not known (cannot find one through network). One amendment:

  > This leaves five candidates - a hand-picked elite, a top 12.5% of qualified candidates.
This is still an idealistic case. The 12.5% is the top sounding applications, not the top applicants. No one knows about who is the best at this stage based on the self praising and only the good included documents that candidates submit. It happened to my wife with a job she desired that she was the 12th pre-selected candidate (10 main applicants, 2 reserves) of a 70 or so applicants based on the submissions documents. Then after the interviews and tests with the 10 'top' applicants she jumped to place no.2, no.1 got a better position meanwhile so she got the job eventually.

What kind of bullshit could have been in those 10 submissions that those got prioritized but none of them found suitable enough after the first round of interviews? I do not dare to imagine. And what was the HR thinking while eliminating the 58 other candidates coming up with 10 unsuitable on top? What are their criteria, nice words and pretty bulletpoints? I honestly been worried what kind of organisation will this be to work for based on their high level of selection mistakes, if it is wise accepting a position there. But it turned out most people there live up to the needs of the organization and it is a pretty ok place (no perfect place exists). Even if no real top gets in - get eliminated among the 58 misfortuned not having pretty enogh submission paperwork for the HR's taste - those do could learn to do the job decent enough in the end, apparently. The recruitment could not ruin things too much. : )

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#102

Post by bdcrazy »

leipert wrote: post #15

> A group of 50 applicants submit resumes for a job. 10 or so of them are delusional, and get cut. I think the author never worked in hiring for an org that got a lot of applicants. When I was a hiring manager, we sometimes opened reqs and got hundreds of applications within the first one or two days.

Getting large numbers of applicants can definitely be time consuming and costly for companies. Trying to find ways to cut the crap out is tough. I recall reading about a manager who would just randomly toss half the resumes, saying he only hired lucky people. I've been around the block before and I'd take the lucky route anytime compared to some continuous interview cycles that never go anywhere.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#103

Post by harryvederci »

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"

"I've always had a passion for frozen yogurt."

- Dave Chappelle

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#105

Post by magicalhippo »

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…

The company I work at is not a startup but we're small, and yeah hiring is hard. Being small, each person makes a huge impact. Someone who under-performs can be a significant net drag, not just in actual output but also in terms of opportunity cost. Fitting in with the team is paramount too as we can't shuffle people around, we're just a handful of folks.

So I can completely relate to wanting to be picky.

I'm not familiar with how things are normally done "over there", but here in Norway all the "how to write a job application" tips that the media writes about here every now an then includes some expert saying to go to the website, read what the company is about, read the job opening description carefully and write something relevant to that. Not unlike what you mention.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#106

Post by ht_th »

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"

True, but among the organizations that have work and money you can do to get the money, some seem to have aims or products or work in domains that align better with your views on the world than other organizations. In the context of job-getting, money as an extrinsic motivator is a given. Parts of a candidate's motivation that are more towards intrinsic might be relevant.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#107

Post by anoplus »

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…

I feel like the important skill to learn is learning itself, and it becomes more and more pronounced. I think the idea of learning and adjusting to each and every company you are about to apply can be intimidating at first. The world is changing fast. Skills and tools deprecate quickly – and it is getting even faster now. It only make sense the recruiter will pay more attention to core traits such as motivation, communication, creativity and ability to learn – vs technical knowledge which is still necessary but has less weight. So having an applicant learned about your company and demonstrating why this particular match could work, could hint about the traits aforementioned.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#108

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

heleninboodler wrote: post #97
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #72

Let's be honest, the alternative to having an open hiring process, i.e. resumes, is nepotism and hiring your chums and the chums of your contacts. Which does describe the hiring process in a lot of startups. Ethical issues aside, the problem with this is that it shrinks the pool of potential hires down drastically, to people who look like you, think like you, and know roughly the same things as you. Great if your cus…

But let's also be honest: startup founders aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed. The fact that their chums tend to be people who look like them and think like them is an unfortunate side effect of this, but the idea of getting candidates via networki…

It's not a fundamentally bad idea from a practical point of view (like I said, I'll leave the ethics out of it), but I think it is not as good an idea as a lot of people think as it narrows the field so much. Also the signal that people get, unless they have worked directly with a person, rather than just chatted with them at a networking event or know them from their childhood, is I would argue "belongs to my tribe", rather than "good at x"

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#109

Post by haasted »

version_five wrote: post #90
ehutch79 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Couldn't it be a simple test of whether the applicant had read the posting thoroughly? It's a quick filter to remove anyone who didn't manage to fulfill this no-effort criteria in their application.

A lot of applicants simply send their resumes to any position that is vaguely relevant, without diving into the details of the role.

A little bit like Van Halen's "Brown M&M clause": https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#110

Post by ajsnigrutin »

ht_th wrote: post #106
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

True, but among the organizations that have work and money you can do to get the money, some seem to have aims or products or work in domains that align better with your views on the world than other organizations. In the context of job-getting, money as an extrinsic motivator is a given. Parts of a candidate's motivation that are more towards intrinsic might be relevant.

Maybe with the population of this site this is more true than the most, but I'd still consider it a minority, even here.

I doubt many plumbers cite a love of modern world development, when they get hired for fixing toilets, or that people assembling washing machines have a passion for clean clothes for other people... or even people working for google don't really have that much passion for collecting other peoples personal data and exploiting it to show ads.

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