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He who submits a resume has already lost

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Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#151

Post by surgical_fire »

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…

Yeah, I remember the time when I had to pretend I was interested in what the company was doing.

It's been almost 10 years that my default answer for the question "why do you want to work here" has been along the lines of "I don't know if I want yet. A recruiter from your company reached out, so I'm evaluating you guys during the interview too".

If the market changes back to favor employers I can go back at faking interest.

Them bills, they keep coming.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#152

Post by surgical_fire »

version_five wrote: post #90
ehutch79 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the cover letter that’s really the problem here. It’s the cult like exuberance that seems to be demands by GP and sibling comments.

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…

> they were deliberately applying for this job because it interested them

If they sent the CV, they did deliberate apply for the job.

I always hated writing cover letters, always felt like the employer wanted me to do some groveling before I earned the right to be graced with an interview.

Good thing now I have ChatGPT for the rescue.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#153

Post by surgical_fire »

jensneuse wrote: post #21
andrewstuart wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> We're not offering you a job. We offer you the opportunity to work together with a smart bunch of people on a very hard problem.

This is the reddest flag of all on any interview process for me. I discard all companies with this attitude.

Working for a company is not a privilege, it is merely an employment.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#154

Post by precompute »

gymbeaux wrote: post #48
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…

While I am no stranger to interacting with developers who seem to only be in the industry because of how well it pays, I find your advice frustrating. My experience with startups is that they demand a lot of A) interest from the candidate immediately , before the candidate has even talked to a human, and B) attention from the candidate- but that same interest and attention is not returned to the candidate. Thinking a…

Were these interviews via triplebyte in the last year or two or before that? I've heard that the platform isn't what it used to be.

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#155

Post by Yoric »

ryandrake wrote: post #75
gymbeaux wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a better way. I really think TripleByte was on to something. No other profession has such a convoluted interviewing system. Imagine if doctors were expected to perform surgeries in X minutes in order to prove they were qualified for the job? Imagine if a lawyer had to prove they graduated from law school by defending a random felon in a court setting. No other profession in existence expects candidate…

This comes up a lot and the reason doctors and lawyers don’t have to do their version of FizzBuzz is that they have strong, organized professional organizations managing their professions and providing a credential that assures some base-level skill. If we had the equivalent of the Bar Exam, we’d only have to take it once and then skip 75% of every interview.

Well, I have a PhD, a pretty large github protofolio, a long list of realizations, code running on most tech devices on this planet (and also at least one device in space, as I've learnt recently), and I'm still asked to complete exercises that are only one step above FizzBuzz.

So... what you write may be true, but it seems to me that many employers are not ready to accept proofs of "base-level skill".

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#156

Post by sharas- »

There is a sentiment in the post that "poor" hiring managers have no other way to weed out the incompetent. At the same time it says that HR functionaries are not even looking at CVs... It is not a contradiction though, such idiocy is natural for those systems. But the sentiment about "poor" hiring managers is a miss. The system is by design: https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html#part-i---ma...

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#157

Post by Yoric »

frrae wrote: post #70
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…

> What's the purpose of sending a CV when I have to do all the hard work? The article we are discussing here claims that there already is an asymmetry in the sense that the applicant has to put time into polishing a resume while the company does basically nothing. So, you are going even further by essentially requiring the applicant to first write an open source library in the space before they are interesting?

Hey, I've done that :)

(well, at least contributing to an open-source library in the space to get an idea of the domain while applying)

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#158

Post by chocolatkey »

nottorp wrote: post #130
chocolatkey wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear since you replied to my comment, coding demonstrations are almost never a part of my interview process. That's not the part I was complaining about. Once I have narrowed down the potential applicants to a few, I do 15-30m interviews where we talk about things on their resume (e.g. "how did you solve X problem at Y job?") or list of skills (e.g. "how would you do task A with tech B?"), and their reaso…

> they don't really bother setting a profile pic or anything for their Discord I dont have a Discord profile pic or personal info filled in in principle. Ive also disabled the exhibitionist “I am playing this now” feature. That makes me a scammer right? Or maybe … privacy oriented?

Well, that's the thing, because you haven't done that, I am now biased to believe you wouldn't be a good applicant regardless of your skills. In the end, the applications gaming has made things worse for everyone, but especially the outliers. And because there's only so much time one can spend screening applicants, the biases will negatively impact genuine candidates as well. The only way out of this I've found so far (aside from the obvious one of networking) is to use paid job posting sites, although that gets to be quite pricey

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#159

Post by sharas- »

leipert wrote: post #20
andrewstuart wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get your point. But when you go through hundreds of applications for a single role, the ones with a cover letter do stand out. Not that I would only hire if you had a cover letter, but it still stands out. One hand folks complain about automatic scanning and rejection based on just the CVs and here we are complaining about the one instrument, a job seeker has, to express interest in the company. To go with your dat…

Most jobs out there are straight up boring. Due to the way simplistifi'er managers are structuring the system. It selects for accountable people, not responsible people. Even if the domain has something interesting in it. The filtering starts with HR functionary demanding a love letter to enter the managers' dollhouse.

https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html#part-i---ma...

Re: He who submits a resume has already lost

#160

Post by fredsmith219 »

Yoric wrote: post #132
andrewstuart wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the right to confirm likely salary offer after interview number two. Unfortunately there’s a really strange thing that happens in very long interview processes, is the employer starts to think something is wrong because the process has taken so long, despite the process being driven by them . Anyhow, to your situation…. It is now an employers market and some of them need to feel loved. So you should effusive…

Well, I pretty much told them that 2 weeks ago. If they want more than that... I'm not sure what else I can do. Right now, I'm actually starting to ponder whether I should tell them "no", because it starts to feel like a red flag.

Ghost them and move on. Why waste your time?
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