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Resumes suck for hiring engineers

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Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#51

Post by eigenvector »

kabouseng wrote: post #49
TTPrograms wrote: post #2

I would think that the other interpretation of this result is just that many engineers suck at writing resumes, which is totally plausible. In fact, one could analyze this in the current data set by looking at the total number of correct predictions versus the different resumes in the set. A well-written resume would then be one which results in correct predictions most frequently. You'd then have two dimensions for…

Since technical writing is part of an engineers job requirements, I would argue that an engineer incapable of writing a decent resume is already at a disadvantage.

Resumes are inherently hard to prepare because the requirements are often deliberately withheld. Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag, but other than basic linguistic elements it's not really a fair way to evaluate someone's technical communication skills. Some companies treat the job posting itself as a type of puzzle you're expected to guess at with your cover letter and resume.

Also, a lot of job postings are terribly written, extremely vague or otherwise problematic, so it's not a one-sided problem. It's hard to know if you're meeting the employer's needs when their posting is asking for someone who could engineer a mission to Mars on their lunch break and will work for $50,000 and 1 week of vacation.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#53

Post by yangchi »

vonnik wrote: post #42

The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here: http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a... We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance.…

>The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time.

I see more and more companies doing this small projects type of initial screening. I like it. But time is actually an expensive cost. Suppose your candidate makes $130,000 per year, which isn't even a high salary in bay area. Then if he/she spends 15 hours on this project, then we are talking about 1000 bucks. Now that is quite a cost, isn't it?

Honestly compared to a white board programming puzzle, such projects always make more sense to me. But most companies will still do white-boards during on-site after the initial project. And although I like most of those projects, even in my case, if I happen to be busy, then I do feel like they are annoying. I'd rather spend my time doing what I was busy doing, or learning new stuff, or working on my pet projects, rather than working on a project that may or may not make sense to me, just to show to other people that I can code, and I can write clean code. Let alone I happen to know some friends who just hate those projects and will never do them unless it's from their dream company. Plus, there are people who are better communicator when they talk face-to-face. Then it's really hard to say if such project is really better than white-boarding for that type of candidates. But it's still way better than those 30-minutes online coding over a phone interview. That's the one I hate most.. Even Skype interview is better than phone interview.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#54

Post by hw »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #13
hw wrote: post #7

It's hard to gauge a person's qualities from a resume. Things like culture fit (extremely important IMO), fast thinker, quick learner - are all aspects that can't be garnered from a resume. IMO, resumes are only a decent filter for experience, and provides a baseline for the interview. There are many I've interviewed that padded their resumes and said they are experienced in something they really aren't, and there ar…

What do you think about the writing sample idea in the article? Doesn't seem crazy to me.

I think having the candidate speak to his favorite project or past work is a great gauge of passion and communication skills. I always ask that, albeit in the face to face interview. It might be good to bump that step further up the funnel, but a lot of 'passion' gets lost in translation when it comes to writing vs talking.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#55

Post by zubairq »

This article should be titled, "Resumes that suck suck for hiring engineers".

Resumes that are clear help someone massively, or at the very least do not get in the way. At NemCV we have 100% success rate finding people jobs, and a CV/resume may not be everything needed to get the job, but is a bare expected minimum. Every employer no matter how they find a candidate always asks for a resume.

Zubair, NemCV

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#56

Post by jnaour »

What I feel right now is that the hiring process is more and more based on personnal branding. If you want to have a job interview in top startup you have to have a good github, smart blog posts, a good stackoverflow, a good kaggle, some certificats from coursera, some conf etc.

It's a good thing for hiring process, you could judge a candidat more easely if you could read some of his code or thoughts. You could have more interesting job offers from people that actually understand what you do. The problem is that you have to spend lot of time in improving these things. Some are easy because it's natural to do some work on a open source project that you're interested in, the personnal branding thing it's just a bonus, but some other need works...

I believe that in all automatic job applying process that I tried recently there were fields for linkedin, github, personnal blogs, websites etc.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#57

Post by cowls »

apolretom wrote: post #36
hacknat wrote: post #14

>For each resume, I had a pretty good idea of how strong the engineer in question was, and I split resumes into two strength-based groups. To make this judgment call, I drew on my personal experience — most of the resumes came from candidates I placed (or tried to place) at top-tier startups. In these cases, I knew exactly how the engineer had done in technical interviews, and, more often than not, I had visibility i…

Thank you. This entire 'study' is nonsense because this recruiter has no idea how 'strong' these candidates really are. She only thinks she knows, just like every arrogant jerk who's ever conducted a technical interview.

Yep, nonsense in = nonsense out. This "study" is pointless.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#58

Post by Zenst »

Sadly one of the biggest problems I have found regarding Resumes/CV's in the IT industry and companies is the rise of HR departments who will just word filter the candidates and even remove people they deem not suitable. Even the classic case of filtering out people they deem `overqualified`, which sadly means the IT manager most often does not get to even see or known about the better candidates and ends up with a selection picked by HR people who know nothing of the work involved.

I for one welcome phone interaction and tests, though not all tests perfect and found many flawed tests and errors in tests in the past. Some companies appreciate when you tell them of mistakes and others will hold it against you, though again, found HR departments if you point out a mistake will not take it onboard and take it as criticism and in a negative way and hold that against you.

So for me, I do feel HR departments play too large a part in recruitment in IT than their skillsets entail.

Not saying a golden solution, but I do feel that many recruitment processes have gone down hill with HR wedging themselves into the process more and more and filtering out candidates that the manager doing the recruiting, never even knows about.

Though this is all based upon my experience and I'm sure others had different views. But for me, having been turned down for a job for being overqualified and case of you actually knowing the manager and he never even got to see your CV, well, sadly I know it is very true and happens.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#59

Post by ownagefool »

JimboOmega wrote: post #47

As someone trying to hire, I find myself going through resumes for the firs ttime... And honestly, my primary metric is if the word "rails" appears anywhere (It's a ruby on rails job). I might even let that go if I saw a cover letter explaining why they liked rails (but maybe don't have professional experience in it). Honestly this is a pretty low bar. And the way I've been doing it, the phone screen that follows is…

Honestly, if hiring permenant staff for long term occupation, I probably wouldn't even require that much. If they have php, perl or python on their CV, then they'll have had the opportunity to know everything else you'll want them to know.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#60

Post by tempestn »

eigenvector wrote: post #51
kabouseng wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since technical writing is part of an engineers job requirements, I would argue that an engineer incapable of writing a decent resume is already at a disadvantage.

Resumes are inherently hard to prepare because the requirements are often deliberately withheld. Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag, but other than basic linguistic elements it's not really a fair way to evaluate someone's technical communication skills. Some companies treat the job posting itself as a type of puzzle you're expected to guess at with your cove…

In the intro of the article, it stated that the strongest signal of applicant quality found on resumes was the number of typos and grammatical errors. Perhaps that was an exaggeration or even a joke, but if not, I would agree that this should be a red flag, regardless of a person's qualifications. (I would similarly judge a potential employer on the quality of their job posting. I know when I write a job posting I go to a great deal of effort to make sure it reads well and reflects our company as well as possible.)
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