He who submits a resume has already lost • Hacker News Board

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#111

Post by version_five » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 8:43 AM UTC

anothernewdude wrote: post #83

jensneuse wrote: post #7

I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero. Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English. 1. Why do you want to take this role? 2. Why are you a good fit fo…

Resumes are the thing I look through. Cover letters are discarded before reading.

Just happened to see this.

If your buying say, steel, presumably you care very little about the supplier, their story, etc. You want specs (carbon content, hardness, annealing temperature, whatever) and price.

Likewise, hiring people as commodities, you don't care about the cover letter, you want to know where they went to school and want experience they have.

If you're trying to hire a person as opposed to a commodity, you will care a lot less about the specs and more about the person, and want to hear their story.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#112

Post by aftergibson » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 8:47 AM UTC

jensneuse wrote: post #7

I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero. Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English. 1. Why do you want to take this role? 2. Why are you a good fit fo…

And step 1 is precisely the hoop-jumping nonsense ChatGPT is automating. Look forward to all candidates providing a resume and a letter generated from "ChatGPT, write a business-y sounding letter that shows my passion for this AI for dogs startup".

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#113

Post by version_five » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 8:47 AM UTC

haasted wrote: post #109

version_five wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see any cult like exuberance. I used to hire and the "cover letter" criteria I had was basically looking for some hint they were deliberately applying for this job because it interested them. That's what I get from the OP. It's not about looking for someone who's pretending they've found their life's passion. It's about preferring people who (hopefully honestly) indicate this would be something they'd want t…

Couldn't it be a simple test of whether the applicant had read the posting thoroughly? It's a quick filter to remove anyone who didn't manage to fulfill this no-effort criteria in their application. A lot of applicants simply send their resumes to any position that is vaguely relevant, without diving into the details of the role. A little bit like Van Halen's "Brown M&M clause": https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/

Yes, they definitely helps. I posted some jobs on linkedin and got absolutely garbage applicants. So the next time I wrote "do not apply on LinkedIn, email cv to xxxx". It was unbelievable to see how I had exactly the same wave of useless applications come in via LinkedIn's automated process, which I got to summarily ignore, and got a way higher average quality sent by email.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#114

Post by heleninboodler » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 8:48 AM UTC

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #108

heleninboodler wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But let's also be honest: startup founders aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed. The fact that their chums tend to be people who look like them and think like them is an unfortunate side effect of this, but the idea of getting candidates via networki…

It's not a fundamentally bad idea from a practical point of view (like I said, I'll leave the ethics out of it), but I think it is not as good an idea as a lot of people think as it narrows the field so much. Also the signal that people get, unless they have worked directly with a person, rather than just chatted with them at a networking event or know them from their childhood, is I would argue "belongs to my tribe"…

Yes, that's totally fair. But I'll say that I've taken or been offered "networking-enhanced" job opportunities in startups a handful of times, and they were always people I knew and had worked with directly, or in one case, someone who was extremely close to a person I had worked with directly.

"Chatted with someone at a networking event" seems like an extremely weak signal, and I'd be suspicious of that type of hire.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#115

Post by snozolli » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 8:55 AM UTC

jensneuse wrote: post #7

I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero. Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English. 1. Why do you want to take this role? 2. Why are you a good fit fo…

From your link:

WunderGraph is an all-in-one solution to build, integrate, deploy and monitor modern APIs. We empower developers to ship faster and with confidence.

What does any of that even mean? If I'm submitting an application, it's because you listed specific skills and experience requirements and I meet them. I'm not going to {insert euphemism here} just to satisfy your ego.

Your hiring approach favors bullshitters.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#116

Post by synecdoche » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:05 AM UTC

carabiner wrote: post #67

jensneuse wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got this exactly right. We're not your family. We are an employer. I think we offer a special opportunity. We give our employees a lot of freedom to structure their work day. There's no office, it's all remote. What we're really just looking for is a healthy mix of passion and experience in the field. I believe that people do their best work when it's easy for them to wake up in the morning, they have low stre…

Is this from Chatgpt? It sounds like generic startup pablum. "We're not like other companies," proceeds to sound like every company.

I don't see the issue. Why change a formula that is known to work? How is anyone to know if it's an honest description and their attitude is genuine? That's what reputation is for. Reputation is most valuable in my opinion and that goes for both potential employer and employee. If it's not available proxies may give some indication, or character evaluation by in person meeting. Does the pitch align with how the other side comes across? It's not a 100% guarantee. The rest is risk, which we can't be without.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#117

Post by RC_Blog » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:07 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #38

As awful as the resume process is it has one advantage that the author seems to have ignored - it's 'fair'. It puts everyone in basically the same footing at the start of the hiring process. Using a system based on recommendations would give popular, attractive, well-connected people an advantage that's unrelated to their skill level. It would make job hopping more beneficial because you'd get to meet and connect wit…

Author here. I don't think any of these points are unreasonable.

I think the apparent conflict comes into play when we treat your point and my point like they are mutually exclusive. But they don't have to be - the resume system can be horrific and the alternatives can be bad in other ways, all in one swoop. It would honestly be weirder if it weren't so - it would imply a perfect process.

For what it's worth, I'm not exactly proposing a "system based on recommendations", and I'm not sure how that would really work if I was proposing it. I'm more saying that the kind of treatment people get when they can bypass the resume-first system is much more human - ideally, there would be a fix that would bring the resume-first system up to the nepotistic treatment level, but I don't claim to know what that is.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#118

Post by ht_th » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:15 AM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #110

ht_th wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but among the organizations that have work and money you can do to get the money, some seem to have aims or products or work in domains that align better with your views on the world than other organizations. In the context of job-getting, money as an extrinsic motivator is a given. Parts of a candidate's motivation that are more towards intrinsic might be relevant.

Maybe with the population of this site this is more true than the most, but I'd still consider it a minority, even here. I doubt many plumbers cite a love of modern world development, when they get hired for fixing toilets, or that people assembling washing machines have a passion for clean clothes for other people... or even people working for google don't really have that much passion for collecting other peoples p…

No, but they might like the sort of projects the organization does with respect to complexity, or that they mostly serve governmental buildings, or that they work in the community they're part of, etc. In the end, you have to make a choice between organizations to work for, and usually they all pay more or less the same. So, what's then the deciding factor?

By the way, this definitely doesn't mean to glorify an organization and what they're doing. Far from it. They're just in it for continued existence and making some money, I suppose. But it is nice if an organization has some social utility, as compared to, say, sell advertisements for crap no-one needs. And I think, if that's important to you, you can refer to that when you're applying for a job.

Of course, if you're working in a field where there's much more candidates than jobs, this is pretty meaningless because you have to take whatever comes your way.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#119

Post by Yoric » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:20 AM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #10

jensneuse wrote: post #7

I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero. Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English. 1. Why do you want to take this role? 2. Why are you a good fit fo…

This attitude is well suited to an employers market in which you need to profess your love for the job and company as part of your job application. A pity the market has turned back this direction. It’s usually accompanied by an employer “looking for someone who loves the opportunity enough to go through our 12 week, 9 interview, 1 whiteboard, 2 coding test process which usually ends in veto and ghosting”. Like telli…

Fun fact: I'm currently through an interview process that has lasted 11 weeks so far, including 12 discussions, 1 system design, 2 coding, 3 behavioral. The employer has informed me several times that they intend to make an offer and that my salary expectations are within their range... but they've been postponing the offer for 3 weeks now and clarified yesterday that they want me to profess that I'm more interested in them than in any other offer I have or might receive before they make an offer.

FWIW, it's a fairly large tech company that pretty much everyone on HN has heard of.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#120

Post by synecdoche » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 9:20 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #43

jensneuse wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you're coming from, but see it differently. This really is a filter. We don't want job applications from people who are looking for a job. We're looking for people who actually want to do work at WunderGraph. We're the first to build a Backend for Frontend Framework, unifying the ideas of API Gateway, BFF and package manager. Our long term goal is to build the GitHub for APIs, a collaborative platf…

>Either you're excited about this as much as we are, or you just send a CV. [...] >It's really not about loving what we do. You do realize your contradicting yourself right? Honestly, young wide-eyed new-grad me (which I bet is your target hiring demographic) would have totally bought into your baloney of "making the world a better place through minimal message oriented transport layers"[1], but as a gray beard I'd r…

I don't have a beard but I'm definitely gray.

It might be about confusing passion for the company with passion for the type of work that is part of what the company needs to be carried out as one and the same.

If those things were clearly separated in the attitude of companies when looking to hire maybe people would be more willing to help both the company and in turn themselves succeed.

Otherwise, it's a bit like professing your unconditioned love before you know what you've bargained for, and that seems backwards.