What happens when you stop relying on resumes
blog.alinelerner.com
What happens when you stop relying on resumes
1–10 of 195 posts
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#2I think this is very interesting counterpoint to TripleByte's data which implied that talking about passion projects was lower signal than their coding quizzes.
The benchmark was performance in a long form coding interview for TripleByte, whereas Aline's is the final offer, so not exactly apples to apples.
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#3I think this is very interesting counterpoint to TripleByte's data which implied that talking about passion projects was lower signal than their coding quizzes. The benchmark was performance in a long form coding interview for TripleByte, whereas Aline's is the final offer, so not exactly apples to apples.
Aline here. Fwiw, I don't disagree with TripleByte's findings... anecdotally, after having interviewed somewhere between 500 and 1000 people in my career, I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code.
What we're actually comparing here, though, isn't coding vs. describing projects. It's describing projects vs. resumes. And I expect that, there, resumes provide a lower signal.
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#4I think this is very interesting counterpoint to TripleByte's data which implied that talking about passion projects was lower signal than their coding quizzes. The benchmark was performance in a long form coding interview for TripleByte, whereas Aline's is the final offer, so not exactly apples to apples.
Aline here. Fwiw, I don't disagree with TripleByte's findings... anecdotally, after having interviewed somewhere between 500 and 1000 people in my career, I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code. What we're actually comparing here, though, isn't coding vs. describing projects. I…
Hey Aline, thanks for the article. I've subscribed to your RSS because your posts are so consistently high quality and well researched, but I actually saw this one on HN before I saw it in my inbox. Cheers.
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#5Another great article from Aline. Past employers, schools, and GPAs can obviously generate false positives. I like this idea overall and would be interested in seeing the results of others. 400 applications to 1 hire isn't a great result, and I was somewhat surprised that only about 5% of applicants were even interviewed.
A few months ago I launched a side project, doing (of all things) resume review and revision services. When my clients want a review of a resume that I know won't get results, and I ask "Give me more to work with", the types of things I hear are eerily similar to the "awesome stuff" quotes in this post. I try to incorporate those things into the resume when possible.
Is it the resume itself that is the problem, or is it that candidates are just less inclined to include additional details (that may seem irrelevant) that could differentiate them from others? Some resumes will list accomplishments that make it rather clear of their qualifications, but everyone doesn't have that luxury.
When a candidate doesn't have a long list of work accomplishments, do they think to include this type of content that might get our attention?
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#6[deleted]
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#7Would a Northrop Grumman engineer with a GitHub full of cool projects really be overlooked in a recruitment process? Not once, that can always happen, but regularly?
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#8Thanks Aline, for yet another well researched article.
I have to say though, that in my experience, these experiments in sourcing work quite well when your hiring is small. The moment you hit some sort of scale, it becomes very very difficult, if not impossible to run and rely on such experiments.
E.g. in the first growth phase at Box, we were tasked with hiring 25 engineers a quarter. At that scale, the company deals with too many resumes and too many stakeholders in the hiring process. And at that point, you also have a group of people explicitly looking at resumes, less involvement from actual hiring managers, deadlines to meet, land to grab etc. Not saying one thing is better than the other, just that hiring at scale is an entirely different game.
The other thing, which is implied in the article, but may get lost if the reader isn't careful: regardless of how a candidate is sourced, the interview bar still remains the same. i.e. AJ also must have had to clear same or similar technical interviews like other engineers that got hired there.
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#9Another great article from Aline. Past employers, schools, and GPAs can obviously generate false positives. I like this idea overall and would be interested in seeing the results of others. 400 applications to 1 hire isn't a great result, and I was somewhat surprised that only about 5% of applicants were even interviewed. A few months ago I launched a side project, doing (of all things) resume review and revision ser…
> 400 applications to 1 hire isn't a great result, and I was somewhat surprised that only about 5% of applicants were even interviewed.
Though Aline didn't give hard numbers on this, I would not be surprised if a majority of the applicants completely ignored Keepsafe's instructions. She mentioned that a bunch just dumped generic cover letters or links in the box instead of actually answering the question.
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#10Would a Northrop Grumman engineer with a GitHub full of cool projects really be overlooked in a recruitment process? Not once, that can always happen, but regularly?
Yes, regularly. Valley has a very short attention span. NG isn't in the list of hip sexy companies.
Same goes with profiles from Cisco, VMWare, Intel, Synposys, IBM, and pretty much all the big companies that were pinnacles of business and your career at one point, but they are not considered hip anymore.
Looking at Github profiles, however much people talk about it, also doesn't regularly happen. It's a chore to type it out in the browser, if you're looking at a paper resume or if it's not hyper-linked. And again, if you worked at NG, what possibly interesting things you could have done? It's not Pinterest or Uber.