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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

#191

Post by analognoise »

leipert wrote: post #20
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 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…

The only times I've ever sent a cover letter I was told "What cover letter?"

The automatic system separated it and nobody looked at it.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#193

Post by senkora »

xtracto wrote: post #186
Yoric wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: I'm currently through an interview process that has lasted 11 weeks so far, including 12 discussions, 1 system design, 2 coding, 3 behavioral. The employer has informed me several times that they intend to make an offer and that my salary expectations are within their range... but they've been postponing the offer for 3 weeks now and clarified yesterday that they want me to profess that I'm more interested…

As someone who has been in the other side of the table , I'm totally confident that they have another candidate and are dragging until they confirm their acceptance or rejection . That, or there was 'something' that made them not pull the trigger with you, and they are waiting to interview more candidates. I'll suggest to keep looking elsewhere,FAST, even if you get another shitty offer, you then can send them an "ul…

+1 to this. We called this step “keep warm” in our recruitment pipeline.

I don’t think we have ever this mean to a candidate though.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#194

Post by jt2190 »

bm3719 wrote: post #163
jensneuse wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sour…

> I've read through your website and documentation and are truly inspired by your vision It's probably more practices like this, where the prospective employee has to enthusiastically profess subservient, slavish devotion to a company in order to be considered a viable candidate. You're writing GraphQL API glue. Everyone knows you're doing it to pay the mortgage. It's not a transcendental experience. By contrary, the…

> It's probably more practices like this, where the prospective employee has to enthusiastically profess subservient, slavish devotion to a company in order to be considered a viable candidate.

Wait, why are you applying to a position that makes you feel this way? You feeling this way is a signal that the job is not for you.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#195

Post by gymbeaux »

chocolatkey wrote: post #87
gymbeaux wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reaso…

Leetcode is incredibly easy (just time-consuming) to game, yet it's colloquially regarded as the gold standard for interviewing.

I know someone who plays that GitHub profile game where they, at first glance, appear to be a contributor to ~20 teams' projects. I can tell you inside of a minute though, that his profile is bullshit. I think it's a great idea to ask the candidate about their public GitHub projects (I also think it's a great idea to ask candidates about their past jobs and make the interview as much like a two-way conversation as possible).

What if there were a system where, for each applicant, it were to A) automatically verify the dates of employment with past employers (perfect for a call center in the third world), B) web scrape any linked SO/GitHub/Medium profiles and evaluate "novelty"/legitimacy, and C) look for certifications (ideally there's a central authority like what doctors and lawyers have - Merit[0] is a startup building something like this)? Surely if something like TripleByte can mint money (at least for a time) when they're MANUALLY vetting candidates, there's a market for an automated/semi-automated system of vetting that still delivers a lot of value by, instead of finding the wheat in the chaff, simply removing all the straw from the chaff and leaving the wheat-finding to individual companies (who tended to do that anyway, even with TripleByte).

[0]https://www.merits.com/

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#196

Post by datatrashfire »

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.

I just think the cover letter is a byzantine chore that's easily faked. Not a real signal that the candidate is a good one.

To your point "in the interview...", I think hammers home the post's key point that the real process is the interview. Everything else is just to get you there.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#197

Post by analognoise »

bjornsing wrote: post #176
bambax wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m sorry, but I am special: there is only one of me on this planet. There may be only one person exactly like you, although with 9 billion people it remains to be proven. But you sure are replaceable by many others with approximately the same set of skills.

Sure. And my general attitude is that if my employer can replace me then they should, so I can do something more productive (where I will be harder to replace). And to state the obvious: when you run your work life like this for 20 years you get pretty hard to replace.

The graveyard is full of the previously irreplaceable.

"...20 years"

Ohh sorry, we can't hire you. It's a "culture fit" issue. (We aren't allowed to say it's an age filter! It's "culture"- we aren't ageist!)

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#198

Post by gymbeaux »

Yoric wrote: post #155
ryandrake wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up a lot and the reason doctors and lawyers don’t have to do their version of FizzBuzz is that they have strong, organized professional organizations managing their professions and providing a credential that assures some base-level skill. If we had the equivalent of the Bar Exam, we’d only have to take it once and then skip 75% of every interview.

Well, I have a PhD, a pretty large github protofolio, a long list of realizations, code running on most tech devices on this planet (and also at least one device in space, as I've learnt recently), and I'm still asked to complete exercises that are only one step above FizzBuzz. So... what you write may be true, but it seems to me that many employers are not ready to accept proofs of "base-level skill".

The problem has always been with companies. They'll pass on people like me, then whine about a tech labor shortage and want H1-B workers. I'm convinced I can do anything an H1-B visa-holder can*, but Google would have to be in dire straits before they even spend time interviewing me. Twitter is about there, I think, but it sounds like such an awful place to work now, so it's a catch 22.

*except be willing to work 50 or 60-hour weeks for 20% below market rate

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#199

Post by gymbeaux »

zikduruqe wrote: post #146
ryandrake wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes up a lot and the reason doctors and lawyers don’t have to do their version of FizzBuzz is that they have strong, organized professional organizations managing their professions and providing a credential that assures some base-level skill. If we had the equivalent of the Bar Exam, we’d only have to take it once and then skip 75% of every interview.

We do. Didn't you see that I passed my Cloud Associate exam that I paid $300 for? I posted it to LinkedIn. /s

Jokes aside, any software engineer would be wise to get one or two cloud certs. Certifications are big in the IT realm (e.g. A+), and while they've historically been a joke in the SWE realm, virtually all SWE job postings I see these days want the candidate to have AWS or Azure experience, and a cert proves that. Yeah the AWS Cloud Practitioner cert is easy, but something like Azure's AZ-204 takes MANY hours of studying/real-world experience to earn.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#200

Post by gymbeaux »

flippinburgers wrote: post #170
gymbeaux wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And now triplebyte is no more which is unfortunate.

It died a year ago, all they did recently was make it Facebook Official.
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