Why I Won't Hire You

No. I'd love to agree with you, but I've seen articles from people just like you (or so they claim) that complain about resumes longer than 1 page. Resumes that include/don't include a cover letter. Resumes that are too short. Resumes that don't cover experiences outside employments. Resumes that do include those experienced.

You see, you mention #2. This guys clearly has a lot of experience. He probably didn't just create that resume just for your job. He's probably been updating a single resume whenever he needs. This means, that resume has gotten him employed at every company on that list.

Think about that.

It's not a problem with people applying, it's with who does the hiring.

I have a good BS detector too. Lots of people do.

Here's the problem: Lots of people are full of BS. That includes interviewers.

Since people are very sensitive to BS either way, a BS impedance mismatch can completely ruin an interview. That means that the BS-appraisal process must complete efficiently and accurately within the first 30 seconds of the interview, which is quite a difficult demand.

Let's discretize the BS axis into two categories: full of BS / hates BS.

So we have 4 situations:

* Interviewer is full of BS, wants to hear BS. Interviewee is full of BS, provides BS. WIN

* Interviewer hates BS. Interviewee is full of BS, provides BS. FAIL.

* Interviewer is full of BS. Interviewee hates BS. FAIL.

* Interviewer and interviewee both hate BS. SUPER WIN.

The problem is that neither the interviewer nor the interviewee are aware of the BS-status of the other individual.

The interviewer, however, is generally in a power position, since we can assume the interviewee wants the job. Therefore it is really up to the interviewee to estimate the BS-status of the interviewer.

So, only two situations are really going to be fundamentally compatible, one of which has much of a chance of landing a good candidate. There is easily a 50% chance of something going wrong at this point just out of luck, or as a result of a misestimated BS status.

If there is a detected mismatch, the interviewee can make a choice: Fake personal BS status (BSer tries to be "real", anti-BSer gives up on personal integrity and provides some BS because that's what is expected by the BS interviewer); or, be true to himself, and either walk out of the interview (politely!), or get down to business and present himself as a serious individual (for the non-BS interviewer).

So, the BS estimate is critical. Moreover, since it's easy to get the impression that most people are full of BS, there may be bias present in the estimator that helps to get things off on the wrong foot.

Notice that _none_ of this has anything to do with whether the interviewee is actually the right candidate for the job. Right off the bat, the BS-status and accuracy and speed of the interviewee's BS estimator is a huge factor in job-getting ability, regardless of other skillsets.

And that is why interviewing sucks, for both parties.

Extreme length is commonly a sign that the person is too lazy to ever prune or clean up things. And my complaint about excessive length is "if they cannot bother to revisit it, why should I?"

I'm aware that every resume is not created from scratch just for me. Still, I should be able to create a guess as to who the person is, what they're looking for, and (generally) why they might be a good fit. If not, why am I reading their resume at all? What am I possibly getting out of it?

While updating resumes usually means adding, that doesn't have to mean that a 1/2 page discussion on tweaking spreadsheets for a law office in 1992 will stand there until retirement. Do I really need to see that someone has experience with Visual Studio 2010, 2008, 2005, 2003, 2000? How about every version of every Office product that they have ever used?

How about a skills section that lists 4 versions of MS DOS? Sure, there's a possibility we have a legacy system to update, but really, if you want to include that stuff, separate the (likely to be) relevant information so that I can find it easily without wading through crap like your Code Warrior Certification in 1995.

I'm not your mother and I'm not going to do the equivalent of cleaning your room just to find out if you might be worth a phone call.

Then we get to his example of a "good" answer for career plans: yet another instance of "In this many years, I see myself that many steps up the corporate ladder. … communication … leadership … responsibility …"