What happens when you stop relying on resumes • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#11

Post by ILIKEPONIES » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:10 PM UTC

soham wrote: post #10

blfr wrote: post #7

Would 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 typ…

This brings up a really good point. Hyperlinking to Github, or other work, in your resume is important. You should make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to say 'yes' in a short amount of time.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#12

Post by vonmoltke » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:12 PM UTC

> While AJ’s government work experience gave him a good amount of cred in the public sector, he found that making the move to industry, and startups especially, was near impossible. It wasn’t that he was blowing interviews. He just couldn’t get through the filter in the first place.

...

> It was AJ, a candidate that Zouhair Belkoura, KeepSafe’s cofounder and CEO, readily admits he would have overlooked, had he come in through traditional channels.

This was the story of my job search three years ago. It still kinda is.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#13

Post by leeny » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

soham wrote: post #8

Thanks 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 deal…

Hey Soham. We have to stop meeting like this :)

Yeah, scaling this stuff is hard. I do think there's a big danger in scaling it by offloading filtering powers to non-technical people because then you have to rely on proxies. Proxies aren't inherently bad, of course, but the ones we have now (school and past employment) are pretty bad, and if ultimately, we're getting things wrong more than we're getting them right, it outweighs the temptation to cut costs and time.

For a company like Box with a super strong engineering brand, it's OK to have a pretty high false negative rate, of course. You can reject a lot of good people and still have a revolving door of others who want to work there. However, smaller companies often take their cues from big ones and adopt the same processes without realizing that they may not work the same way.

And yes, thank you so much for calling that out. AJ had to meet the same bar as everyone else. Fortunately, he killed it.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#14

Post by leeny » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

ILIKEPONIES wrote: post #11

soham wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 typ…

This brings up a really good point. Hyperlinking to Github, or other work, in your resume is important. You should make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to say 'yes' in a short amount of time.

What sucks is that even if it's hyperlinked, people probably won't click it. I don't have clickthrough data for resumes (if someone does, that'd be awesome), but anecdotally, clicks won't happen unless you really call out to the reader that it' worth their time.

When you're reading resumes you go into awful zombie mode (I do this too). If you're writing one, pretend your audience is a braindead zombie that needs to be spoonfed everything. If you have cool projects, list them and describe them concisely in a way that makes clear that they're interesting and a big deal. And link to each project if possible to increase odds of click.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#15

Post by ammon » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:18 PM UTC

Interesting post. Talking and writing about yourself well, even when not matched with programming well, probably helps get job offers (and in many cases helps be a good employee). It's difficult to tease these two thing apart. I imagine looking at speaking and writing can still miss great people (as can every filter), but I can believe that it's much better than looking at resumes.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#16

Post by brettlangdon » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:22 PM UTC

leeny wrote: post #14

ILIKEPONIES wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings up a really good point. Hyperlinking to Github, or other work, in your resume is important. You should make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to say 'yes' in a short amount of time.

What sucks is that even if it's hyperlinked, people probably won't click it. I don't have clickthrough data for resumes (if someone does, that'd be awesome), but anecdotally, clicks won't happen unless you really call out to the reader that it' worth their time. When you're reading resumes you go into awful zombie mode (I do this too). If you're writing one, pretend your audience is a braindead zombie that needs to b…

Obviously everyone is different in how they review resumes, but I am Software Engineer and whenever I see a resume with a github, I'll usually visit that first before even reading the rest of their resume.

Since I work in and around Github and open source, usually someone's Github will tell me what I really want to know about them (not always, but really good candidates have a Github profile that stands out).

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#17

Post by nether » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:23 PM UTC

soham wrote: post #10

blfr wrote: post #7

Would 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 typ…

> And again, if you worked at NG, what possibly interesting things you could have done?

Applicant: Well, I wrote a code to optimize a UAV flight path to avoid enemy radar and minimize fuel consumption, and debugged another controls code to prevent people from dying. Did some debugging on a computational electrodynamics code for radar simulations...

Recruiter: Oh. You know what's cool? Photo sharing.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#18

Post by ILIKEPONIES » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:26 PM UTC

leeny wrote: post #14

ILIKEPONIES wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings up a really good point. Hyperlinking to Github, or other work, in your resume is important. You should make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to say 'yes' in a short amount of time.

What sucks is that even if it's hyperlinked, people probably won't click it. I don't have clickthrough data for resumes (if someone does, that'd be awesome), but anecdotally, clicks won't happen unless you really call out to the reader that it' worth their time. When you're reading resumes you go into awful zombie mode (I do this too). If you're writing one, pretend your audience is a braindead zombie that needs to b…

Very true. Although candidates also need to be careful to link in moderation. It's all about adding the most interesting/relevant projects and then knowing when to stop. If you give a zombie too many links to click (like on the web), he/she will most likely click none of them and move on.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#19

Post by Harj » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

We have the same belief in the limited usefulness of resumes at Triplebyte. We found talking about projects with candidates both more enjoyable and interesting than looking at words on a resume. Especially when people are enthusiastic about what they built.

The difficulty we had was not seeing a strong correlation between talking about projects and doing well at programming during an interview.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#20

Post by codeonfire » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 7:37 PM UTC

When people abandoned resumes like this it's because there is some corruption in their hiring process and lesser skilled management is attempting to hire down for political control. Their only goal is to go through the motions and stay employed. Some people don't want experts. They want to have the illusion of a functioning business unit. People with no formal training that have projects that sound impressive to the layperson are not going to make waves or quit when they find out that management really doesn't know what they're doing. Just as one can build a model airplane in their garage, those same people will never be able to build an airliner. It's not a good idea to hire hobbyists if you're in the airliner business. When you have layperson managers judging what is a strong candidate and what is important technology, you are going to get hobbyists skilled in popular tech and your company is going to get worthless hobbyist tech for your organization. For example, the article refers to an 'open source Android animation library.' To many people that sounds like a massive, great achievement. On the tech scale of importance it is a 0 or 1 out of ten. No business can be formed around an animation library, it's not a difficult or uncommon thing, and there are thousands of alternatives.