Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We created a fake language to root out resume liars

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 771 posts

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#161

Post by beaconstudios »

dnh44 wrote: post #95
ivalm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, lots of people colloquially claim to be good at chess but can’t even stumble though a proper opening. The difference between say a class-a player and a rando is massive and easy to tell.

Memorising openings is also a crutch for players who aren’t that good so I’m not sure if I would use that as a benchmark for good players.

Memorising openings is also good for avoiding well known traps like the fried liver, fishing pole or Eric Rosen's favourite the Stafford gambit. Most strong players have a variety of book openings memorised.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#162

Post by pydry »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #128
brigandish wrote: post #77

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx file, or a PDF? The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.

Recruiters routinely & legitimately edit CVs to remove your identifying information when they send your profile over to clients to prevent them from bypassing the recruiter.

PDFs are pretty trivial to edit anyway.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#164

Post by toyg »

projectileboy wrote: post #136
dmos62 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an isolated case.

Nope. Sales is sales is sales. It’s a pretty harsh world. If you’ve been a solid performer for years, maybe you can miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.

Glengarry Glensales, basically...

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#165

Post by avereveard »

devenblake wrote: post #146
brigandish wrote: post #77

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

Reading all these replies and - what the hell? Are recruiters really that common? Are bad recruiters really that common? I wasn't aware this was even a thing.

yes, even on larger agencies, you can find shitty recruiters that think their work is to move meat around.

once a recruiter made me run trough 5 interviews. I had a full time job at a time, with a decent pay, and explicitly stated my requested salary upfront. after the whole charade, which burned a significant amount of my vacation days since I was working at another city at the moment, they just came out and said the budget for the position was less than the asking price, but feel convinced it would have been a great opportunity for me.

goddamn scum.

oh, and the "opportunity" went into bankruptcy forced liquidation two years later.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#166

Post by beaconstudios »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #119
ALittleLight wrote: post #10

This reminds me of an anecdote I read once, maybe in Liars Poker, about how lots of people applying to this hedge fund put "Chess" on their resume somewhere thinking it made them seem like a deep or strategic thinker. As it happened, at this hedge fund there worked a former Soviet master or grandmaster ranked player. And so, whenever interviewing any candidate who claimed great proficiency with chess on their resume,…

I wouldn’t put “chess” onto my resume unless I was at least titled. Otherwise, what is a signal that it sends to the hedge fund crowd of overachievers? That you have a hobby that you managed to not get good at?

I have chess on my CV even though I stopped seriously playing at 15 and ~1700 OTB ELO - not to showcase my competitiveness but to add some flavour/personality to what is otherwise a very dry career oriented document and maybe get an anecdote in that I can use to break the ice or relate to somebody.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#167

Post by woko »

prepend wrote: post #114
k4tz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good take. I like to play chess recreationally; I also know I'm terrible at chess. Never in a thousand years would I put it on my resume.

It depends where. Under skills seems silly, but under interests seems reasonable. I have a single line on my resume with interests. I don’t list chess, but list cryptography. Because I’m interested in it. I just have that line to help with chitchat during the interview. If some interviewer interpreted that to mean I was a professional cryptographer and that I sucked at it, that would be dumb of them. I also list an i…

Yes, interests is for chit-chat. If the interviewer assumes special qualities based on the interests of the interviewee, it is on the interviewer.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#168

Post by toyg »

ilaksh wrote: post #121
brigandish wrote: post #77

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

I had a front-end long-term contract many years ago that required expertise with C#, WPF, Silverlight and something else I forget. I had those things covered, but I soon learned that I was also supposedly an expert in SharePoint and an experienced graphic artist. The reality is that if they had given me any requirements for SharePoint I could have built that for them even though I had never used it. But graphic desig…

> a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality

I bet the Alan Partridge jokes were flying...

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#169

Post by Cthulhu_ »

brigandish wrote: post #77

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

Yeah, recruiters are incentivised to sell you to a company, that's when they get paid. I believe a lot of companies have a clause that the recruiter only gets paid if the new employee works at the company for an X amount of time, but I suspect they gamble on the employee blending in.

But it's damaging, and the company will not be pleased with the recruiter if they find out they've scammed them into hiring.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#170

Post by yulaow »

znpy wrote: post #76
iwangulenko wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech recruiter here. Firms on average are more dishonest than jobseekers. The reason is simple: If you do something often enough, you get sloppy. For instance, if you start going to the gym, at first, your exercise execution is perfect but after some weeks you get sloppier and sloppier. Same here, firms that are hiring constantly tend to get fatigued. Jobseekers, however, are "active" for some weeks until they switch…

> Firms on average are more dishonest than jobseekers. This. It happened to me to receive CVs for a position and the actual candidate was completely clueless. Yet the recruiting firm was really pushing that as "a very good candidate albeit a bit junior". OTOH, it happened to me that I had an interview with a consulting firm. They would basically forward my CV to the actual client and only hire me if the client "accep…

I had few contacts with consulting firms because I actively try to avoid them, in particular the big ones. But each one with which I had an interview was clear they were going to modify my cv for their client and they even asked me to lie in the future meetings with those so that I could confirm whatever they were gonna write in the cv.
Post reply on HN