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What happens when you stop relying on resumes

blog.alinelerner.com

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Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#21

Post by pzxc »

vonmoltke wrote: post #12

> 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 i…

I'm going through this right now as well. I ran my own business for 7 years, making content websites monetized through google adsense, building games, and freelancing, among other things. The primary source of revenue was adsense, and it paid the bills enough for me not to need a "real job" for years. 18 months ago, the adsense revenue started to dry up, and in an effort to make some additional income, I started looking for a normal job again.

I ended up reluctantly taking a job working for the State of California, mostly because the schedule was flexible and it was a 5 minute commute. In the last 18 months I've gotten two promotions, including one four months after I started which is unheard of in state service (and which my bosses had to fight HR to get). I spearheaded the acquisition and implemented of a version control system, which no one hear had ever used (they were just FTPing files all the time, risking overwriting of others' work etc), and got buy-in from all the developers who now say they couldn't imagine working without it. I also now wear a variety of hats besides programming including sysadmin work, dba work, architecture design, etc. My bosses rely on me more and more everyday just for my opinions and advice, let alone the work I do.

Yet now, when I send out my resume, it's almost always crickets. A year and a half ago, when the first item on my work experience list was "failed entrepreneurship", the response rate to my resume was about 80% (not even talking about interviews, just getting a response at all). Now it's more like 20%, all because the first item in my work experience section is my current job working in public service.

I admit, many of my coworkers probably deserve the reputation that public sector work has. A significant number of them are clock-watchers that the bosses don't even try to assign anything important to, because they know they don't give a shit and can't easily be fired (union), they are just filling a chair waiting for their public pension to accumulate over 20-30 years. Nevertheless, I also list on my resume all of the above, including the pioneering (for us) work I've accomplished here implementing version control etc. I never intended to stay here more than a couple of years, but I also never intended for this job to have such a negative impact on my job prospects.

I think I am probably going to revise my resume to leave this job off completely, and just say I've been working for myself for 9 years instead of 7. I predict sadly that this will return the response rate back to what it was before I had this job.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#22

Post by brettlangdon »

fecak wrote: post #5

Another 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…

I can speak from my own experiences reviewing engineering candidates.

Sometimes when you see someone's resume and they have great work accomplishments, like "last 4 years at [successful, engineering focused company], building their [product everyone knows about] platform", it makes deciding to interview that person fairly easy. However, there is that issue when someone is either just starting out from college, who doesn't have a lot of work experience or who hasn't had the best of work experiences (usually not their fault). For these people the main thing that I look for and try to evaluate is their ability to learn on their own. The main thing to consider when reviewing a candidate like that is, if they aren't as up to speed on the technology we need them to, how long do I think it will take to on-board them and get them self-sufficient on our platform. If someone does not have the best resume, but their Github profile is full of projects, even half finished projects, of them trying out different languages or frameworks or maybe making (or trying to make) contributions to open source, it usually makes it easier to say "lets give them a chance," especially if they have been playing around with the languages/frameworks we use.

Hope that helps answer your question.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#23

Post by walshemj »

vonmoltke wrote: post #12

> 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 i…

What was the thing a about AJ's cv that his TS/DV clearance Cyber Sec job made so hard if your recruiting out of that pool you know whats what.

My cv makes reference to some experiments I worked on at my first job which are described in very generic terms to avoid any problems with the official secrets act.

eg "complex problems involving digitizing data, from both still and high-speed film cameras."

I do like the idea of a straight up pitch using the more interesting jobs I have done

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#24

Post by s_q_b »

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…

Don't overlook the East Coast firms. CSC, SAIC, Unisys, Booz | Allen | Hamilton, Mitre, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and smaller companies are developing very sophisticated software, especially in data science (my field), and not just for the government.

A lot of these positions are highly competitive and involve a great deal of skill and education. Around here, they're still seen as major resume builders.

Anecdotally, I haven't had trouble securing interviews with West Coast firms even though my background is with a major East Coast company.

Maybe that's because I ran a funded startup for a few years, or maybe it's just the demand in my field, but "hipness" seems like a very bad metric for evaluating previous employers.

As for the interesting things they are executing at these firms, trust me, there are plenty of very innovative products, even in the commercial spaces such as healthcare. Machine learning, big data, practical cryptography, and basic research problems abound.

Look through some unclassified materials and talk to some people about their civilian work experiences and one can hear all about many fascinating technologies, all of which certainly trounce Pinterest in terms of interesting projects.

Rogue nuclear weapons location intelligence, international fugitive management tracking, and human trafficking are primarily targeted by highly sophisticated machine learning pipelines at sub-second analysis speeds.

Water basin management, flood gauge tracking, flood inundation maps, roadway construction modeling... Your average mid-senior developer from one these companies has expertise in a variety of fields: data analysis, civil engineering estimation (hydrology, hydrodynamics), physical simulation, DevOps, embedded software, and low-level machine architecture.

If the National Guard ever rescues you from a flood, you'll be grateful for their HEC-RAS's software, the government contractor who created the estimate flood plain in using GIS, and the civil engineer who verified the estimates at the local level.

The "hip"-ness of previous employers is a bad metric. Maybe the employee would need to adjust to the business culture of the West Coast, but in my experience people generally adapt to new working environments quite well.

Disqualifying someone over working at a major East Coast tech firm is a heuristic with a very high false negative rate.

Also, you'll find many people from those firms looking to make a fresh start, work for less to get started, and a lot of them are refugees looking to escape the bureaucracy of their current positions, which renders them extra-motivated as a new hire.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#25

Post by woah »

codeonfire wrote: post #20

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…

What are you talking about? The odds are that the company hiring started as a "worthless hobby"

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#26

Post by vonmoltke »

nether wrote: post #17
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…

> 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.

On top of that, hope your title was never "Systems Engineer"[1] at one of these companies. If it was, prepare for a whole lot of clueless recruiters and managers to misunderstand your experience.

[1] At Raytheon, if you were the one developing radar avoidance algorithms[2] and code, that was probably your title.

[2] "Algorithms", another word that has slightly different meaning leading to major misinterpretation.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#27

Post by coldcode »

Harj wrote: post #19

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.

I do wish more people would do this. I've written about a number of times but I'm afraid its not all that popular. People feel a strange aversion to just talking.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#28

Post by vonmoltke »

walshemj wrote: post #23
vonmoltke wrote: post #12

> 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 i…

What was the thing a about AJ's cv that his TS/DV clearance Cyber Sec job made so hard if your recruiting out of that pool you know whats what. My cv makes reference to some experiments I worked on at my first job which are described in very generic terms to avoid any problems with the official secrets act. eg "complex problems involving digitizing data, from both still and high-speed film cameras." I do like the ide…

> What was the thing a about AJ's cv that his TS/DV clearance Cyber Sec job made so hard if your recruiting out of that pool you know whats what.

In that sense he had an advantage over me. The sec people know the deal with the engineers who work for the government on this stuff. I did radar signal processing code; without details I can't share it becomes very hard for me to explain how my background is relevant even though I could prove it in a practical task.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#29

Post by fecak »

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?

15+ years ago I got my recruiting career going by taking 3-7 year engineers from defense and putting them into startups, but that was a different time. I don't think you'd be overlooked by open-minded managers and recruiters who realize there is lots of complex work being done in places like NG. I do think you might get overlooked by recruiters who have only worked in the startup world and might not even know who NG is.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#30

Post by coldcode »

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.

I've been writing my programming blog for nearly 10 years and always put it up top on the resume, in all that time only two people actually read anything on the blog, and both hired me. The rest of people who actually read my resume (itself rare) never even looked it up.
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