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Resumes suck for hiring engineers

blog.alinelerner.com

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Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#151

Post by LordHumungous »

ddebernardy wrote: post #72
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.…

> The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. As in working for you for free, and on a WE to boot? For a student or someone who is unemployed, that might work. For someone with a job and a family life, I don't think so. Especially if that person can command a $120k+ salary.

So you'd rather do a five hour technical interview than work on a toy project for five hours? Personally I'd rather do the latter.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#152

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Bahamut wrote: post #129
raverbashing wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I got an interview with Google without having "JavaScript" in my resume, and with tons of AngularJS on it. I did link to my GitHub though, where it shows contributions to Angular, various Angular plugins, and other random libraries. I ended up turning down the interview after accepting another offer though.

I've got a blatant http://... hyperlink on the top of my resume. Almost nobody clicks on it. I went to an interview where they requested code samples which they could have already reviewed beforehand if they had just followed that link.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#153

Post by pc86 »

jplahn wrote: post #140
pc86 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days I tailor my resume for every single job application You absolutely need to do this unless you're in crazy demand. Every generic resume I've sent out has yielded exactly zero phone calls. Every tailor-made resume I've sent out has gotten at least to the in-person interview stage. Survivor bias? Maybe, but 5 jobs in since college and I'm never sending generic resumes anywhere ever again.

While I understand the sentiment, I only used a single resume for all of my applications this past fall. But I think the reason it worked is that I knew what positions I wanted to apply for and they were all similar(ish). So my resume matched all of them. I did find that when I was applying to the bigger SV companies (and Seattle), I wasn't necessarily applying for a specific position, so even if I had wanted to tail…

That is a good point. I have not yet applied "to a company," but rather for a specific position within a company.

I'm sure if I was trying to get a job at Buffer or someplace like that where you are mostly applying to the company, I'd need to rethink my strategy.

(I have no affiliation with Buffer whatsoever).

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#154

Post by vonnik »

hnnewguy wrote: post #108
danielweber wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, they get to contribute to the company for free .

I almost spit out my coffee when the OP stated " for free ", as if not having to pay anything but time, my most valuable asset, was some perk. I'm sure the OP means well, and it may have been a success for them, but I don't know anyone in my circle who would participate in something like this, unless they were utterly desperate for a job. I thought there was a serious talent crunch? Who is courting whom? I wonder wha…

One reason why engineers and companies have trouble discussing the job market is that talented people who know how to craft their resumes don't imagine that any other kind of candidate exists.

Unemployed people have lots of time. Understand that and you'll understand why a weekend like this makes sense.

One reason they're unemployed is that they don't know how to demonstrate their value. A lot of engineers are actually poor at communicating, and not that great at resumes.

This weekend was for them.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#155

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mikeryan wrote: post #112
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…

Its a bit pedantic but if your "hiring manager"* doesn't know Red Hat from Linux you don't want to work there. If a recruiter or HR rep doesn't know Red Hat from Linux they need to find another field to recruit in. (a hiring manager is usually the person a new hire directly reports to, not the person doing initial resume screening)

The problem is that tons of resumes are getting rejected by ATS' due to low keyword match scores without ever passing across human eyes.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#156

Post by vonnik »

danielweber wrote: post #92
ddebernardy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. As in working for you for free, and on a WE to boot? For a student or someone who is unemployed, that might work. For someone with a job and a family life, I don't think so. Especially if that person can command a $120k+ salary.

Dude, they get to contribute to the company for free .

See above. We didn't ask them to work for us.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#157

Post by marcosdumay »

codingdave wrote: post #85

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…

> There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in.

Lots of people say that. Are you sure? Obviously, if one treats people as "resources", and don't let them shine, that's almost true. But I've seen a few times already a single person completely transform the place they work at, sometimes even when not given a chance.

> I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point... 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.

And what that one thing will be that's not a skill? If you (that looks at lots of CVs) don't have any preconceived notion of what you want, how do you expect the people that has this feature will include it on their CV?

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#158

Post by marcosdumay »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #11
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a stronger statement than is intended in the article - theoretically if people wrote resumes differently they could be good, but the way they are used now, they are bad. You're providing a theory as to why they are bad now, but not really contradicting anything in the article.

Probably just arguing semantics at this point. I think "engineers need to all learn how to write resumes differently from how any of them do now" qualifies as a pretty fundamental change. Although I guess you really only need to get the good ones to do it. :-)

From my conclusions, that's also a valid take-away.

Looks like it goes both ways. Companies will gain better candidates if they stopped using resumes, and engineers will land better jobs if they started creating resumes that are different from what everybody else writes.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#159

Post by victortrac »

Terr_ wrote: post #29
stmchn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head here and probably why so many engineering jobs are gained through personal referrals instead of cold resumes. I know that's how I got hired at most of the companies I've worked at. The company I work at building a way to capture those recommendations and that concept of trust through peer-to-peer reviews: https://www.roikoi.com/ The site asks you to play a anonymously game compari…

Sounds like it'd be hard to get statistical relevance in most companies...

The nice thing about ROIKOI (disclaimer: I also work there) is that we don't need all signals to be from your current company. We get signals from previous companies, people you've gone to school with, and people you may know in your city.

All of the leaderboards for the companies that I worked for are all top notch folks I would hire in a heartbeat, so so far our output has been fantastic.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#160

Post by nnnnni »

mikeryan wrote: post #112
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…

Its a bit pedantic but if your "hiring manager"* doesn't know Red Hat from Linux you don't want to work there. If a recruiter or HR rep doesn't know Red Hat from Linux they need to find another field to recruit in. (a hiring manager is usually the person a new hire directly reports to, not the person doing initial resume screening)

This was a state government position where the "hiring manager" is "the person who looks at resumes and decides who to call to be interviewed" rather than the direct supervisor of the new hire.

Maybe I used the wrong phrase or maybe it just means different things in different places.

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