for anyone relating with every "engineers suck at writing resumes" comment; I've been using my stackoverflow profile as a resume and it's been working out great.
Resumes suck for hiring engineers
41–50 of 172 posts
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#42The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here:
http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a...
We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance. A study that Google released last year supports that.
The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. They chose what they wanted to work on together.
In a sense, we were batch processing applicants while gathering much richer information than resumes provide. Strong candidates we didn't hire, we shared in the Sequoia network.
We ended up making eight interview offers (several candidates decided to work elsewhere), and we hired one engineer.
The whole event was inspired by this essay: http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? I was slightly perturbed by the original author as she offered no real solution.
She did suggest an idea - asking for a clear explanation of a project, as a sort of writing sample.
But that's on the applicant's side of the equation. How is that a solution for the employer?
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? I was slightly perturbed by the original author as she offered no real solution.
> Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? Where's the evidence that resumes are better than random selection among applicants into the next round, much less enough better to be a net positive given the resources that go into reviewing them?
Huh? I think you're confusing the concept of "top of the funnel". Are you suggesting that I randomly select people to interview from a pile of resumes? What if I get a marketing person who has no software experience in the pile for a software developer job?
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative? I was slightly perturbed by the original author as she offered no real solution.
She did suggest an idea - asking for a clear explanation of a project, as a sort of writing sample.
It's definitely not a solution for an employer who is just like scraping resumes off of Monster or something, but it's not much different from the uncontroversial practice of asking for a cover letter.
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#46Resumes are just a broad filter for skills and a way to find useful questions to later flesh out a candidate and their competence/experience level. It shouldn't be shocking that code samples and/or a short programming test and a phone call will tell you more about the candidate, and if they should come in for a full interview, than blind keyword bingo.
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#47As someone trying to hire, I find myself going through resumes for the firs ttime...
And honestly, my primary metric is if the word "rails" appears anywhere (It's a ruby on rails job). I might even let that go if I saw a cover letter explaining why they liked rails (but maybe don't have professional experience in it).
Honestly this is a pretty low bar. And the way I've been doing it, the phone screen that follows is pretty softball. But after that, I give out the coding exercise...
If you complete it, you get an in person interview for the most part. But all the rest of it - looking at resumes, the phone screen - sort of seems like a waist of time. I don't care how big a game you can talk, if you can't do the coding exercise (which, btw, is the most common outcome - they beg a couple extensions and then give up), then... oh well.
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#48The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here: http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a... We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance.…
This sounds like a really interesting idea. I probably takes a weekend to prepare a proper application anyway, so spending the time on a project (which may be fun even) sounds much better.
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#49I would think that the other interpretation of this result is just that many engineers suck at writing resumes, which is totally plausible. In fact, one could analyze this in the current data set by looking at the total number of correct predictions versus the different resumes in the set. A well-written resume would then be one which results in correct predictions most frequently. You'd then have two dimensions for…
Since technical writing is part of an engineers job requirements, I would argue that an engineer incapable of writing a decent resume is already at a disadvantage.
Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers
#50The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here: http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a... We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance.…
This is a good interview process for a coding gig. I am a devops engineer who is mainly a system administrator. I code but I code as a tool not as a goal. So for this kind of positions looking for coding performance does not give good indicators. Or you can not do this kind of experiment for other kinds of positions.