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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

#181

Post by vonmoltke »

braythwayt wrote: post #99
sytelus wrote: post #88

You can do much more easier, automated filtering: Ask candidate to submit link to any of the followings: 1. Github a/c 2. StackOverflow a/c 3. Their blog 4. Anything they made online If candidate fails to submit link for any of above then just don't interview them. I would guesstimate this simple check filters out 70% of the junk resume and probably 20% of the good resumes. It can scale like crazy and expanded even m…

Anything with 20% false negatives is fine if you expect to have five or more hireable people apply every time you advertise. But if you are in a situation where you might get 200 people applying and perhaps one or sometimes two are actually worth hiring, a 20% false negative is crippling.

This point does not get addressed nearly enough. Aline (I think?) mentioned elsewhere in the thread that much of the conventional wisdom on hiring has come from Google and other companies with deep hiring pipelines. Google can afford high false positive rates because their pipeline still generates sufficient numbers of hires in spite of it. This fact seems to be lost on most of the small companies trying to cargo-cult their hiring practices.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#182

Post by davemel37 »

vonmoltke wrote: post #175
davemel37 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the costs (both direct and ancillary) of making a bad hire are so high that anything we can do avoid making the wrong hire would be worthwhile. You might be right that randomly picking candidates might be just as efficient, but I can't imagine anyone taking that risk.

> True, but the costs (both direct and ancillary) of making a bad hire are so high that anything we can do avoid making the wrong hire would be worthwhile. That's a load of highly-enriched equine fertilizer. I have had this discussion here before. I asked for information. I didn't get much. Some worst-case hypotheticals that, to my knowledge, have never happened anywhere. A buttload of management failures surrounding…

I actually agree that the biggest cost of a bad employee is a management failure to either create an environment that the employee can thrive or is too "nice" to confront reality and get rid of them quickly. I can't speak to your experiences and I never said bad hires were costly due to the employee vs. Management screwups. The simple reality is that every day a bad hire is in place, is a day that a much more productive employee is not in place, which costs could be astronomical.

The bottom line is that "slow to hire and fast to fire" as difficult as it is, is very sound advice!

Without knowing you and jumping to a conclusion based on your comment, I assume you don't appreciate that employee boss relationships are adversarial by nature and there is often considerations management makes that might seem bad but are really a product of their understanding of whats possible and realistic within limiting circumstances...

I used to complain with my friends about all the things we would change in our boss and the company we worked for and now after many years I realize that at the time I had no flipping clue about anything.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#183

Post by msandford »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #179
tjradcliffe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that you never find out because if someone bombs the coding part you simply chuckle and say "well that person is clearly a liar, or something!" and they don't go any further in the hiring process. This. I've been job-hunting lately and getting asked to do "technical challenges" and such like, which are useless to me because they are entirely asymmetric. They tell me nothing about the company except t…

I've known a couple physics phds about whom I have very low opinions re: their mathematical abilities.

And I know one who's excellent at the math to the complete ignorance of actually understanding what's physically going on. Once he has a differential equation written that's the law, full stop. Even if it produces results that can't possibly be right re: physical reality. Drives me bananas.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#184

Post by noarchy »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #72

I just went through a job search, and never created a resume. I only submitted my linkedin. If anyone required a resume, I immediately responded that we weren't a good culture fit. Worked out really well. Not sure it's to be duplicated, but for me it went fantastically.

It often happens that recruiters will contact me on LinkedIn, on which my resume is essentially laid out in some detail, and then still demand a resume. I assume they have to enter an old-style resume into some sort of internal database, as per company policy.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#185

Post by jghn »

Jemmeh wrote: post #55
vonmoltke wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I frequently put my title on resumes as whatever the company I am applying for is calling it. There's so many names for the same thing. If we call it "programmer" at this job and they call it "software developer" at the place I'm applying to-- well, I can read the requirements in the ad. Usually it is similar enough to not matter. So I just put software developer even if that's not the title on my paystub. Gets me pa…

I sometimes put both, but never the full switch like that. I'm too paranoid that I'll come across someone who does balk at the slight difference.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#187

Post by sytelus »

throwaway12309 wrote: post #98
sytelus wrote: post #88

You can do much more easier, automated filtering: Ask candidate to submit link to any of the followings: 1. Github a/c 2. StackOverflow a/c 3. Their blog 4. Anything they made online If candidate fails to submit link for any of above then just don't interview them. I would guesstimate this simple check filters out 70% of the junk resume and probably 20% of the good resumes. It can scale like crazy and expanded even m…

* 20+ years of development experience 15 of those professionally * published author of various books * worked in systems that most startups would shit their pants with the requirements * some of the big name companies have tried to poach me based on the products I've worked * used professionally: C, C++, F#, C#, Ruby(Rails), Swift, Obj-C, Kotlin, Haskell, Scala I would never be called based on that criteria as I have…

I personally know many people who have similar profile as you. They are all very smart and absolutely worth interviewing but when you are designing a probabilistic system to classify something at scale (think 1000+ resumes flowing in every week), things needs to be automated, fast and there are going to be false negatives. You should always make data driven decision for your scenario, for example, collect resumes of all people who are working out great for your company and extract patterns from their resumes.

However there is another more stronger counterpoint that I've argued with people around me. As developera pretty much all of us have used StackOverflow to get answers, used someone's blog to learn something or looked in to GitHub repo for some code. It just feels natural and ethically responsible to me that we also return back something to the community from which we consuming so much. People who are sweating out these content without any expectations of financial gains or even fame are obviously sacrificing their free time to help others. Why can't you return the favor? The lack of any evidence of your contribution to community may not reflect deficiency in your skill set but it does put a question mark on self-initiatives that you might take in your job or your willingness to help your colleagues even if it doesn't benefit you or your drive to make others become better from your learnings. After certain stage in career, skill sets are given and what matters is your ability to multiply your impact by leveraging and empowering others. Your participation and contributions to community are good indicators in this area, however false negatives and edge cases always exists.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#188

Post by cbhl »

vonmoltke wrote: post #174
cbhl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process being broken isn't a deal-breaker for companies, which can still hire from the 90% that can deal with the broken system. It's a deal-breaker for the 10% that are bad at playing the game / jumping hoops / resume writing / interviews, because they can't get a job.

Except many of those companies are simultaneously bitching about "lack of talent".

I am biased, but I think that if it was possible in America to graduate with virtually zero student debt and 20-24 months of industry experience in a five-year bachelor's program, despite having little to no savings prior to starting college, leading software companies wouldn't need to import developers and engineers on H1Bs and TNs. Immigration lawyers are expensive, you know.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#189

Post by cbhl »

marcosdumay wrote: post #172
cbhl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process being broken isn't a deal-breaker for companies, which can still hire from the 90% that can deal with the broken system. It's a deal-breaker for the 10% that are bad at playing the game / jumping hoops / resume writing / interviews, because they can't get a job.

It's also a golden opportunity for anybody able to hire those 10%. Maybe most companies shouldn't be different. But there's plenty of value in not being like everybody else.

Yup -- I'm excited for the Starfighter CTF by patio11, tptacek, et al.
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