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Resumes suck for hiring engineers

blog.alinelerner.com

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81–90 of 172 posts

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#81

Post by InclinedPlane »

mbesto wrote: post #27

> As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the board, and after running the numbers, it began to look like resumes might not be a particularly effective filtering tool in the first place. Her theory - people suck at filtering because the tool they use is poor. > it may not be a matter of being good or bad at judging resumes but rather a matter of the task itself being flawed — at the end o…

No, you shouldn't treat hiring like a sales funnel, you really shouldn't. Treat hiring like an investment, because it is. Treat it like a competitive advantage, because it is. Treat it like a skill your company and everyone in it needs to constantly be improving at, because they do. Treat it like one of the most important things you do, because it is.

A company is made up of people, hiring is to a company as mitosis is to the human body, it's fundamental. The better you can be at hiring the better your company will be. More talented, more capable employees translates to better execution on projects, better ideas, better products, more revenue, a higher profile, and a greater pull for more talent out in the industry. If you treat it like boiler room telemarketing grabass then you'll end up with a company to match those ideals.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#82

Post by pm90 »

vonnik wrote: post #42

The 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.…

Interestingly, Google itself still extensively uses resumes. In fact, I've been asked by Google recruiters to include "Everything you can" in the resume.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#83

Post by kristopolous »

nnnnni wrote: post #68

You know what's frustrating? When you don't even make it to the interview stage because hiring managers think that "Red Hat" and "Linux" are two different things. I was recently passed over because my 15 years' of experience with Linux has been with multiple distributions (including RPM-based ones) and my resume didn't have a line that just said "Red Hat" on it. Them: "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't hire you because you don…

I think that I won't be compatible in a culture where such process is acceptable. If my first touch-point at a company is profound incompetence, I've already wasted enough of my time.

I do not look forward to being on a team with people who were compatible with such a brain-damaged arbitrary system. I've been engaged with too many clients where every day of work is a theater of the absurd.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#84

Post by madcaptenor »

terranstyler wrote: post #61
hw wrote: post #7

It's hard to gauge a person's qualities from a resume. Things like culture fit (extremely important IMO), fast thinker, quick learner - are all aspects that can't be garnered from a resume. IMO, resumes are only a decent filter for experience, and provides a baseline for the interview. There are many I've interviewed that padded their resumes and said they are experienced in something they really aren't, and there ar…

Are you hiring right now? I wrote exactly these two tags "fast thinker" / "quick learner" in my CV / cover letter / LinkedIn profile and I removed them a few months later because from my experience it looks like they drive recruiters away or scare them.

Also, those terms don't contain a signal. Anyone can say they're a fast thinker or a quick learner.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#85

Post by codingdave »

Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation.

When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops.

I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list of names down to a reasonable number to actually call. So I'm not judging people's skill levels yet -- I'm looking for something in their history that tells me they are bringing more to the table than knowing how to code. I don't even have preconceived notions of what that might be - just something that sparks me to think their experience has something in common with what we do. We'll weed out the weak technical candidates in an initial call, then continue with the people who are both strong technically and a good fit for the work and the culture.

So the whole premise that I am not getting it "right" when judging a person skill based on their resume is missing the point. It isn't that I don't care... but I know reading a resume won't give me an accurate answer, so it isn't even a piece of the decision making criteria yet.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#87

Post by kabdib »

stared wrote: post #77

The experiment looks flawed. It seems that ALL (or almost all) resumes are, at least, OK. Resumes can work for weeding out bad fits, or people doing things clearly out of the scope of interest. They are not, and cannot, be a tool for choosing the best. (Unless success is so spectacular, that you know the person by name anyway.) It's HR's delusion that previous -perceived- presented achievements written on one's resum…

There were one or two turkeys in my string of samples, but for the most part the candidates were worth a phone screen.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#88

Post by raverbashing »

CmonDev wrote: post #76
nnnnni wrote: post #68

You know what's frustrating? When you don't even make it to the interview stage because hiring managers think that "Red Hat" and "Linux" are two different things. I was recently passed over because my 15 years' of experience with Linux has been with multiple distributions (including RPM-based ones) and my resume didn't have a line that just said "Red Hat" on it. Them: "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't hire you because you don…

Treat CV writing as a SEO task: "JavaScripted the JavaScript scripts using the JavaScript MVC framework Angular.js (JavaScript)." instead of "Implemented using Angular.js".

Exactly this.

I don't think Google can give a good match to a Javascript CV with only Angular.js written

Yes, it's stupid. Yes, do it.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#89

Post by learnstats2 »

If you exclude a single outlier (a candidate rated poorly by the experimenter scores 100% in the resume test), the resume test doesn't look too bad.

Apart from that one, the consistently well-rated CVs are all from the strong side.

So it could be argued that CVs work pretty well for recruiters - hiring from the best CVs makes it unlikely you'll hire a weak candidate.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#90

Post by AmirS2 »

hacknat wrote: post #14

>For each resume, I had a pretty good idea of how strong the engineer in question was, and I split resumes into two strength-based groups. To make this judgment call, I drew on my personal experience — most of the resumes came from candidates I placed (or tried to place) at top-tier startups. In these cases, I knew exactly how the engineer had done in technical interviews, and, more often than not, I had visibility i…

Looks like the author explicitly considered that:

> To try to understand whether people really were this bad at the task or whether perhaps the task itself was flawed, I ran some more stats. One thing I wanted to understand, in particular, was whether inter-rater agreement was high. In other words, when rating resumes, were participants disagreeing with each other more often than you’d expect to happen by chance? If so, then even if my criteria for whether each resume belonged to a strong candidate wasn’t perfect, the results would still be compelling

The result of the Fleiss' kappa test subsequently run was negative, i.e. people didn't agree with each other either. So maybe the author's judgement was wrong, but that doesn't affect the conclusions.

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